Rapture through Natural Transcription in Paintings of Calina Pandele Yttredal

By John Austin

It has long been true in all painting that a heightened sense of expressive contrast in any work deepens the emotional range of the artist`s efforts. This is certainly apt as the viewer contemplates the emotional range and the optical sumptuousness of Calina Pandele Yttredal`s paintings exploring the relationship between humans and nature.

The tension that is felt between color and form is a driving force in her work but this charge of energy is always applied with nuance as well as directness. While color is a principal player in the artist`s work, the artist is particulary sensitive to the application of masses of hue and tone. Overall, we see the artist`s characteristic use of color with deliberation and energy in order for it to exude the maximal amount of vibrancy and presence.

This overridding quotient of vitality stems from Pandele Yttredal's authoritative capacity to infuse each painterly effort with a breakdown of figure-ground relationships. There are some figures in her representational works where dissolution is kept masterfully at bay and purposefully so. In some of her more purely landscape paintings the artist seems to be indwelling within a ludic domain which suffuses the beholder. There is a process of luring the viewer into an associational game within these aesthetic efforts, of attempting to lead the viewer into identifying representational elements within the frame. The overallness of Pandele Yttredal`s work leads us beholders to participate in its history as materialized consciousness. We are invited to suspend disbelief and to become involved, even aroused at the impact that each picture has on the eye of the viewer.

The artist states: “At my first solo exhibition in New York, at Artifact Gallery, I show a new series paintings, "Through Possible Landscapes". In a time when we follow nature's fluctuations with great excitement, when a tiny disturbance of temperature balance can have serious consequences for the planet and our lives, we question our existence on earth and our relationship to nature. We see man walking from burning lava landscapes to frozen landscapes (“Ice and Lava”), or linger on the edge of the cliff, feeling the undertow from the falls (“At the Gorge”), alone with the forces of nature, in search of a safe place to be (“A Place on Earth?”). Often inspired by the wild Nordic landscapes, even in a seemingly idyllic fairytale landscape (“The Source”), it lurks an underlying sense of mystery or fear of the unknown, of what is to come.”

The suggestive presence of the artist, adds the component of connotation to each painting. This charged nuance allows each image to transcend the mere space and time component which it records. Each work, while recalling with almost ethnographic-like quality the cultural ethos of each geographic territory is also highly aware of its cultural code-making effect and its convention. The result is a project which defines space and time. The place is a dual one: it is where the ethos both of a culture or a region is made manifest as well as being inscribed with the personalized intensity of its maker, that is Calina Pandele Yttredal herself. 

The most evident aspect of this work is the remarkable freedom the artist is capable of unleashing. The second aspect is the careful registration of marks and pattering that coalesce into an overall image of dignity and power. The imagistic aspect of the artist`s work is furthermore coupled with an intense application of energetic paint strokes – each one carefully calibrated to bring out a residual image which seems to slowly make its way to the surface of the pictorial plane. It is the dynamic tension and its release that  makes each image vibrate with a stillness and density.

Looking at Calina Pandele Yttredal's work in order to identify their various notations and marks, an attempt to "read" them for their near associational messages might be time well spent for some people. And yet it would be far more pleasurable and satisfying to see each work as a living entity outside of the realm of guessing games. The heartfelt ambiguity which is at the core of each work is part of the conceptual attitude that infuses the artist's overall project. Here the real and imagined, the known and the unknown co-exists as does the unseen with the seen, the visible and the invisible, the discernible with the evanescent. 

Fundamentally, the mysteriousness aspect of each work is the psychic residue left between the ineffable distance of conscious reality and unconscious processes of recording the beauty of Calina Pandele Yttredal´s painterly application. This is the gift which this artist so provocatively brings to the world and it stems from a rare discernment and the capacity to see beyond sight`s everyday parameters.

John Austin is an art critic based in Manhattan.