From myth to the 21st

 

century Archaic and futuristic at the same time, Jamie Bischof descends towards the essences of ancient cultures and weaves together some elements that unite them. She affirms her devotion to the Mayan codes. And indeed some pieces recall those refined hieroglyphs. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in his approach to stylized and primal forms he sets out to search for the Jungian dimensions of the collective unconscious. Ritual, dive into the universe of myth and magic. But the astonishing thing about this artist's plasticity lies in the transformation that she makes of this dreamlike and real material to create a very personal code. He invents traditions: from the generic name Utá to that of suggestive resonances to historical and paradoxically very current, to the transcription of the cosmogonic with a plastic writing of the twentieth and almost twenty-first century. Suspended in the void of the Plexiglas sheets, Jamie's icy figures engage in a lively dialogue with each other and then with the viewers. In a truly dialectical game, the pieces of Utá al are autonomous and dependent at the same time. Its mirrored textures create kinetic sensations in the observer. Thus Utá al adheres to us and we to her. Get us to project not only our colors but also our fantasies.

 

The compositional elements keep an admirable rigor. In its apparent harshness, this artist's work is full of conflicts and contradictions. Upon receiving light, the aluminum surfaces form a kind of volumetric and changing chiaroscuro within the neutral mono color. Ready to detach from the horizontal surface, the geometrizing sculptures alternate with others that appear irregular fragments of meteorites from other galaxies. And so he manages to warm compositions that otherwise would have fallen into monotony. Three-dimensional shapes sometimes show deceptive disharmony; in reality they hide a subtle structural balance in their sequences: a curved unitive line; opposites finding their other half. The luminous and contrapuntal art of Utá al launches us on an ambitious journey from the cosmic and collective feeling of the ancestral afterworld to its projections in sidereal dimensions of the future. Jamie solidifies with the prodigious purity of his plastic explorations the synthesis of the past and the future with sharp reliefs, restrains the chaos with the line. Plasma the symmetry of symmetry

 

Lucrecia Mendez de Penedo

Prensa LIbre, October 4, 1982