STATEMENT
My love for being in nature has grown to become a passionate love affair with the linear and knobby forms of trees and what they can become as I express their inherent patterns and form with paint and collage.
The painted branches spread out like a road map, or knots in hair -- diverging and converging in various points combined with the collaged pieces of cut up photographs (of these trees and their branches).
The photograph, both as a subject/object and source, is an integral component in my process. Its physicality in the painting serves as a contrasting form that becomes iconographic and literal. It also functions as a medium of capturing, altering and distilling the real world towards a state that is disappearing and appearing at the same time.
This re-envisioning and re-representation of the cut up photographs mixed with paint into a landscape or tree abstraction is an expression of my memory, nostalgia and experiences with my view of nature as land and territory. The process of photographing and then cutting the printed photograph to only put back together again is a practice of mental mimesis in the act of piecing together towards a final disillusioned whole.
I am influenced by the tradition of Chinese landscape painting and the manner the artists created each deliberate mark towards emphasizing the relevance of the negative neutral space. I approach the negative space in my work as a form of light. Form is suspended yet inertial; space is shallow and deep -- all within a blazing light that can recall dreams and nightmares all at once.
Fallen, Cut photographs, acrylic and enamel on mylar. 30" x 32", c. 2009
THE FOLLOWING IS AN ESSAY
BY INDEPENDENT CRITIC, WRITER AND CURATOR DEBORAH MCLEOD
In the fixed distance--blanched a sporadic white in the jewel thicket of Isabel Manalo's dappled and blistered trees--is the natural landscape of the hypothesis of No Place. Manalo provides hints of presences; children who silently populate its partly extant glens and forests to slip shyly through the watery-colored overgrowth, as pale pink, barely perceptible silhouettes. Like a more benign version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," these children's innate perfection and innocence, nurtured in such a tempting garden of uncertainties and absences, might be subject to the diminishing atmosphere and decomposing glare that Manalo's vegetation endures, yet respond by becoming essentially eternal. DM, Baltimore City Paper
Isabel Manalo’s paintings possess an uncommon transcendence and mysticism. Yet they are essentially simple and familiar in their subject matter, often with her two young daughters engaged in exploration and wonder amid the natural world. Even when the scenes are left unpopulated, it is the phenomena of the natural world that has always guided this artist’s landscape imagery. Landscape is however just the beginning of what these dynamic transmissions of time in space envision.
Manalo’s manner of giving us the physical world we expect to find outside our door is to dematerialize it to a barely recognizable degree. She quietly explodes the information, removing much of its supporting structure, allowing a few brilliant and vital fragments in the expected places to keep her viewers grounded and happy. Her paintings may most consciously remind us on a naturalistic level of very early spring or late autumn, when only the boldest foliage and blossoms enter or exit, while the rest, unavailable, exist purely in nature’s mind.
Subconsciously, the crucial white space that consumes the rest of Manalo’s picture plane offers itself as a kind of immortal reassurance. White space is generally understood to represent infinitude, the unknowable or the uninitiated, states that nonetheless most nearly describe what we can genuinely perceive of our earthly relationship to The Sublime. It is this crucial infinite white space that is really the land our deepest questions, uncertainties, hopes and prayers, our very breath, lives in.
The skipping, jewel-like glances of vivid translucent color so musically applied to the picture plane meanwhile provide a sense of hopeful providence and even joy, but it remains to that living mutable white ground that is so utterly freeing inside Manalo’s unarticulated imagery to provide us with an ultimate prospective.
Whatever presents itself to us in the concrete always requires some form of reaction, responsibility or maintenance, even if simply as a painting – a thing that holds someone else’s thesis. Once it is beheld it asks for something. The art work we actually choose to live with all contains terms we wish to reciprocate. So its dissipation into a place we cannot access requires that it fall into the purview of some further caretaker. The gift of release from that is perhaps the particular divine provenance of Isabel Manalo’s painted worlds.
Deborah McLeod
2008
Independent Curator and Critic