Trini  Permanent Impermanence   Luis Carlos Emerich

More illusory than the instantaneous freezing of a visual image is the fixed idea that the iconic images that to a great extent comprise 20th Century memory represent relics or immutable milestones, and not – precisely because they can’t be replicated – exceptions that prove the rule of the impossibility of understanding the whole without them. This reluctance to accept the impermanence and even perishability of beings, things and concepts may be because the will to live can be weaker than the will to transcend.  In the 20th Century – “constructed” of  images like none other – the tendency to accept impermanence or temporality as a “blind” rule, and even more to structure reality on that basis, made the illusion the definitive task in perception and, as such, the true measure of reality.

So innate to humans is the relish for sight, said Román Gubern with reference to “virtual reality,” that the goal of the optical illusion “is to make the observer believe he is in front of the real thing, and not its copy.”  And so it seems that from now on, only the ephemeral will be transcendent, and as virtual reality is perfected technologically, the fake hyperreality will be more accepted than the reality itself.

Among concepts so debated as the real and realism, Naturalism and Verism, the illusive and the virtual, the concept of realism in contemporary painting is far from how it is construed academically, that is, as an imitative, representational and putative expression of life and its conditions and values. In part, the proliferation and perfection of the means of producing, applying, manipulating and distributing images have stripped painting of many of its traditional objectives and liberated it from its representational prisons. Far from precipitating the so-often-prophesied death of painting, this has impelled profound self-examination that has given it new life. And in part, the now-long endurance of Objectuality (objetualismo) and Conceptualism have tended to cast realistic painting as rather “retro,” like an archaic profession unwilling to disappear, to move into utilitarian disciplines, to obligate itself to remember what was, yet propose something more than the nostalgic. Thus in a sense the classically conceived pictorial image is suppressing the expressive and reflective. And, in the extreme, it values what is proper to it and it alone above technical expertise and mere visual interest.

This self-examination has yielded an enrichment of the ways of assessing contemporary realist pictorial images, in comparison to what can be achieved by technological means, in order to plant itself in a context in which despite being conceptual, it refuses to set beauty aside, much less humanistic considerations. If the quality of execution and the union of form, figure, space, proportion and coloring into a living dynamic now seem no more sophisticated than a grade-school reader, then all its other qualities are promoted to the true objective of the painted image. And if any attempt at symbolic projection likewise has been abandoned in assimilation of (instead of competition with) the skills of photography as a technical toolbox or sort of category of identification, then what was representation is elevated into a system of importance and meaning.

The painters molded in the realism of the 1980s (that is, amid full debate of the concepts of post-modernity) such as Trini (Katrien Vangheluwe, born 1962 in Roeselare, West Flanders, Belgium) use the tools of academicism only to make this category for identifying reality relevant and convincing. But its ultimate aim is to explore the potentials of the image at deeper planes.

Trini did her master’s in painting at the Academy of San Carlos, and has lived in Mexico for 15 years. Since the beginning of her professional career, it has been clear that her pictorial realism doesn’t stop at her technical virtuosity. Nor at her imaginative persuasiveness in transporting us to her niche of personal and private reality or in calling attention to selected social or existential conditions. This is to say that her aim has gone beyond the equivalent of a “staging” (as Gubern calls traditional images) to suggest that her work serves as the threshold of a “labyrinth” or a winding path, however joyful, that leads towards planes more profound than mere reflection. All without depriving the viewer of the old miracle of communicating through manual sensibility and grace.

Even though Trini’s paintings are based on photographs she took,  her “snapshots” of events in the city streets and establishments aren’t necessarily buttressed by the singularity of her observation of  public places, behavior or idiosyncratic traits, but by the premise that movement is all, taking rest (according to Newton’s First Law) as a special type of motion. So people strolling on sidewalks or crossing streets or traveling on bicycles or motorcycles or cars or buses aren’t just images of urban bustle but living manifestations whose exceptionality, typically unnoted, may lie in the real uniqueness of that follower of routine. Or in that testimony that speed is the governor of life, if perhaps not its true substance.

The main concept in Trini’s painting could be defined as a form of resistance  to the illusion of virtuality, in order to put forth a discourse on temporality, and because of that quality of impermanence, the impossibility of defining, of focusing, the image. Being a realist painter, she has consigned to the realm of falsehood the imaginary landscape, the still life, the individual or group pose unequivocally and lazily accepted as real, and even the mere depiction of idiosyncracies or phenomena of any type. These are clichés used as communal pathways to the theme of mobility and memory. Thus, beings, things and places are trajectories for her, traces of energy, borings into time, air and light, as if the ghosts of the image were haunting her definition of “truth,” fleetingly and permanently.

The paintings of Trini are neither copies nor paraphrases of photographic images, and not even visual chronicles of urban events, because nothing more significant than movement happens in them. Freed from any narrative possibility and without pretensions of metaphorizing the mechanics of that displacement, Trini uses photographic records as evident structures for the solution of strictly pictorial problems. Without rejecting but without limiting herself to the traditional expressive potential of painting,  Trini creates multiple means of expressing  movement, which happily seek to achieve precisely the opposite of Vanitas (that Baroque genre revisited until post-modern surfeit), because her depictions symbolize neither the final disposition of the life passage nor impart admonitions.

Trini synthesizes actions, abstracting representations. Her methods of applying pigments follow the same path as her motives. Her models don’t pose; they happen. All things pass, or will. The sketch outlines figures as they vanish in time and space. By day, the figures are like concentrations or interruptions of the ambient coloration, always at the point of washout. By night, mobility is chromatic vibration. The surroundings are diffuse, like the vision from a car at high speed, blots whose original identity is blurred in the passing. Despite the recognizable points of reference, these are abstractions and as such their composition is purely visual, based in a dynamic equilibrium of chromatic weights and counterweights, in direct relationship to the proportions and nuances of their placement.  So the flying landscape, added emotionally to the fleetingness of the observer, is like the vibration of an eyeblink.

The nighttime versions of the streets of Mexico City, painted by Trini at the beginning of the 1990s, reveal that, for European eyes, our metropolis can provoke  estrangement: The solitary loneliness of the streets, imperturbable even by occasional invasions, and their profound alienation are more enigmatic than ominous. With the flow of vehicles and pedestrians toned down, the dead of night is the realm of ghosts. Empty, the buses are darkened, the traffic lights blink, the streetlamps take on the dignity of monuments, the cars streak far off into the grayness, the asphalt polishes the fog. What’s all wrapped up in silence is the city.

Later, Trini would see people and vehicles as speeding like shooting stars, staining the night. These bodies splaying light become compositional elements in themselves, and certainly dynamic ones. Furtiveness is the theme. All the motifs are present.  Next, Trini turned to the emotion generated by movement. Her series Decisiones (1999), perhaps because it has locations in Havana, led her to speculate on human motives for movement, maybe trivial ones for the people in the capitivation of that trance, but profoundly enigmatic for the visiting onlooker.  In this series, the central motif is figures who must make decisions, walking or in their vehicles, suspended between various crossroads. Here the fleeting quality is the clash among the dynamic ruminations, silences and the movement suggested by a kind of temptation to define oneself against the void.

Mundos ambulantes, the title of her most recent exhibition, is about the dynamic of looks, as sly as their motives, between drivers and passengers in cars, as if from that alone could exude her psychic concept of the automobile: That is, house, status, identity, power and nationality make a small but fathomless kingdom. The absorbed look of the passenger on a crowded bus, as well as that of a solitary driver in the infinity, seems to emerge from a primordial darkness, from a hot lair, or a self-imposed shell. This is the only link between these humans armored within their defenses who, on the other hand, yearn for their humanity.

Trini’s painting has intentionally alluded to the work of the German painter Gerhard Richter (born, Dresden, 1932), obviously for the superficial resemblance in the treatment of her images because the core motivation of both is linguistic in the final analysis. Richter’s convincing forcefulness in asserting that different languages will attribute different connotations to a single theme in distinct ways is corroborated not only by the persuasiveness of his own painting, but also by an example that would seem obvious. “The photograph of a painting isn’t a painting, but a painting based on a photographic image is a painting.”  Thus did Richter draw the boundaries of two semantic terrains, giving to the pictorial transposition from the language of photography aesthetic attributes that are alien to those of photography. In this sense, the painting of Trini becomes comparable to Richter’s, because the aims of their respective images at times bear resemblance. Nonetheless, the emotionality of Trini’s painting has nothing to do with the expressions of grief, sorrow and affliction in the work of Richter that spilled, not by surprise, into Tachism. (Roughly, post-World War II European abstract expressionism, originally French.)

More essentially, Trini’s painting is kin to the themes of the global latency of sentiments of loss and irretrievability, of the unpredictability of even the near future, owing to the fact that the complexity of life today hinders art’s ability to influence that dormancy. In terms of her generation, she would be closer, for example, to the Brazilian Daniel Senise, even though there’s no formal similarity between their work. Senise doesn’t deal with temporality, as does Trini, but instead with the unpardonable absence of beings and things, evidenced by the vanishing of their marks on time, which is represented by the No Man’s Land that is the surface of the painting itself. Trini, as well as Senise and many young artists today, continues to broaden the conceptual potential of painting, without abstaining from its expressiveness, which is hopeful.

Trini’s clear technical virtuosity would be enough to validate her work. But if one knew her photographs, which are free of aesthetic pretension and whose documental nature is no more serious than a family snapshot, it would be easier to distinguish the excellent aesthetic of her transpositions – not only of visual languages, but of connotative levels. If this amounts to the linguistic, good, because that is congruent with the theme par excellence of post-modernity. But it’s even better when her efforts achieve entry into the realm of poetry.