Iva Gueorguieva

IVA GUEORGUIEVA

IVA GUEORGUIEVA

AMERINGER McENERY YOHE

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com

2

Iva Gueorguieva at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe

by Sarah Bay Gachot

Sun, you wake us and put us to sleep, you touch our circadian rhythms like a telepathic twin. I feel you from so far away — Desert Willow is aggravated, then meditative. Iva Gueorguieva’s layers of color march across the canvas, up against a radiant web of hatch lines. A figure, pronounced for the abstract world in which Gueorguieva normally works, crouches to the left beneath this pattern, poring over her own radiant puddle, its glow less organized, more organic. She read from the repetition above that we have tried to understand the contents of the sun, listing the elements, but there is no satisfaction— there is more to life than clear understanding. Cataloging, listing, knowing do not provoke conversation, and they have no business here, so she looks away. There are statements in red and orange; suggestions in black; and musings, songs, and questions in gold. There is a landscape to traverse.

These are the unsettled things one might see in Desert Willow.

Gueorguieva went to the emptiest place she could find—to see more. She spent days in the California desert, looking at and moving through the landscape. The relationship of space, seeing, flatness, and illusion, inspired by her desert experience, saturates this exhibition at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, Gueorguieva’s fifth with the gallery. It’s a theme that has preoccupied the artist in one form or another for some time. “When I spoke with Gueorguieva about the activity of painting,” Maggie Nelson wrote in an essay for the catalog of Making Sense at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum in 2014, “she described to me—with irresistibly contagious wonder—how, at its most basic, painting is the creation of space out of a flat surface.” Nelson quoted Gueorguieva further: “ ‘Every time the brush hits the canvas, it makes a space,’ she said. ‘And even though I know it’s going to do this, every single time I put brush to canvas, I am surprised: It made a space!’ ” The Gardener (detail), 2016

3

Gueorguieva fills this space with psychic architecture, hummocks, gyres, and extrusions, whole narratives of figures camouflaged into the ground, and the ground made figural. Sometimes imagining herself a photographer in her darkroom, she looks for the latent image, pulling it from the surface with a pigmented brush over water that she has just splashed on muslin, pulling the invisible out from within.

4

Can you hear that horizon— Look deep. Across My Own Folly stretches multiple horizon lines that fan out over a wrecking ship.

This ship careens through one side of the canvas, while two small figures—witnesses, Gueorguieva calls them—concern themselves silently on the other side. “There’s a different sonic quality on the left and the right,” she says, and I agree. “It really makes sense that there are rhythms and sonic spaces along with form and color and atmosphere.” One can hear it, an orchestra gone atonal, playing the song of a ship tearing itself apart under the mismatched weights of water and buoyancy. A turquoise-blue mast stands still among the chaos. Gueorguieva talks about the efforts to save the ship—she points to the area of chaos. There might be people there. She also talks about chora, referring to Plato’s notion of a space that is defined by the dance of action within it, an idea in contrast to Aristotle’s topos, a benign space unconnected to action.

One could never be unaffected by the space of her paintings. Not here with this ship. Not ever.

A confusion of edges— Gueorguieva began incorporating printmaking into her paintings six years ago, and soon—perhaps it was the tactility of the etching plate, or the mechanics of the photogravure process—characters began to roll effortlessly from the wall. From collage, paint, and printmaking, she found epoxy clay, Hydro-Stone, concrete, sheets of reclaimed steel, and rebar—seemingly plucked off her canvases like souvenirs collected from these visual journeys. These sculptural creatures are further evidence of Gueorguieva’s wonderment over space: From three dimensions, she now summons two. “Flat is painted into space,” she says, with amusement. She sees the sculptures as a place to play with edge and the illusion of an edge; a new alchemy of dimensionality.

Peddler of Limbs is “a knight returning from battle,” she says, his concrete block of a head heavy, stocky, and held high. A ribbon of pink draped from his shoulder and tangled around his neck could be parade armor or a trophy of viscera from combat.

Two desert-branches in monochrome-grey recline in Couple at Rest, cradled into one side of a poured concrete block. Stone sticks point up opposite them, serving as their protectors or as markers for their grave embrace. One might see them as stripped of color, because the sun has gone down and it is dark. The eyes see in black-and-white at night, when we rest.

Green Man, with a lame branch leg—cast from the same branch as one of the Couple—watches tall, as a figure witness. Gueorguieva sees him standing near Couple at Rest. Perhaps he has brought the couple together, or torn them apart.

Forest is about the wind, Gueorguieva says, and things carried from afar. One sees accumulation, the detritus of a sun-bleached ribbon, and Hydro-Stone-cast limbs of the desert that are stabbed into a concrete corner, as a curious finger is stabbed by cactus needles.

Creek is run through with an epoxy-clay ribbon of water flecked with sunlight. The precarious nature of our water use, in California especially, strikes at Gueorguieva’s gut. She sees brilliance in its natural specificity, cupping her hands close to her face, saying, “the way a stone in the desert makes this little place for water to gather, and there will be this little plant growing there and nowhere else.”

This is what she sees in the desert. In the city, her conversations with the sun bleach out all color. In the desert, sunlight saturates the color of everything, and when one looks closely at these sculptures, one will see the infinite details she found in a place that seems on the surface so very quiet and still—a surface teeming with crevices, flaws, grit, and tiny plants. One won’t see it unless one loses his or her own perspective and takes on Gueorguieva’s—moves in with her dialectic of dimensionality.

Sight as touch, sight as sound— These paintings, drawings, and sculptures are never settled—spilling forth, generous with small gestures and brazen marks. One can move one’s eyes across the layers of paint and collage, as if picking up the pieces, turning them over in one’s mind to gauge texture and weight. The writer and artist Hervé Guibert once discovered in a scientific article that to see was “an activity similar to touching.”

In his collection of writings on vision and photography, Ghost Image, first published in 1982, he recounted how small an area of focus we have on our retinas. To see clearly, we had to physically move

5

this spot, called the fovea, through space, over objects, as though it were a finger. The rest of our peripheral vision, he suggested, then became instant memory, “a stationary image that continued to vibrate slightly, that remained suspended a while before completely disintegrating, covered by another pattern of acute or obscure vision in the dream image.” One can scan Gueorguieva’s paintings with one’s eyes, and scan again, touching each swath and shape, vaguely reminiscent of this dream—a specific dream now. These paintings are never settled. There is too much to see, and the dream image, disintegrating, builds itself back up again as one looks more closely from a new perspective.

6

Her perspective, here perspective — As a species, some of us strive to dwell in high places for reasons other than protection. One might, for instance, live on a hill in the middle of a city, facing the sea or a mountain range, for a better view. Others might build skyscrapers to work in or live in towers that overlook their towns. They look to the horizon for answers. It’s hard not to look at the horizon. It’s a natural focus when framed by a window.

Gueorguieva knows the trouble this can cause. Somewhere here is a deep paradox of a Sisyphean scope: There is the horizon, but once one gets a good look, it becomes impossible to reach because you are no longer on the ground—and if you could get there, there would only be more horizon. “If we could just lie on the ground and be horizontal all the time, maybe we would understand the landscape better,” she says to me in so many words. In the California desert, you can be on the ground and always see the horizon.

This is the puzzle she embeds in her work—what she calls strategies of differentiation. “The universe is all of these desires and conflicts and synchronicities,” she says. She sees the multiple interpretations and presents them all at once. How does one see? By remembering and sensing one’s multiverse place in the world—by accepting that challenge to stay vertical—but accepting that this state is ever in flux and that one-point perspective is an illusion. So step to the left, or to the right, get down low, or stand high, touch what you see, hear your vision, scramble your lists, flatten your space, and fatten n your flat. One is never settled until the perspective is settled—and is defining the space.

Sarah Bay Gachot is a writer, educator, and artist who lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the editor and author of Robert Cumming: The Difficulties of Nonsense (Aperture, 2016) and will be curating a show of Cumming’s photographs at the George Eastman Museum in 2017.

2-D to 3-D: Iva Gueorguieva’s Constructed Connectivity

by Jaime DeSimone

Iva Gueorguieva’s paintings and sculptures are investigations of space, where painterly illusion and physical materiality intertwine. In her paintings, deep illusionistic space is abruptly destroyed by the visible edges of a collaged piece, which in turn spills into a wash of color. In these semi-abstract fields, the viewer discovers fragments of bodies and of landscapes. Countless layers of paint and of hand-painted and printed collage produce a space that continuously shifts between foreground and background, from completion to collapse. In the sculptures, real three-dimensionality vaguely implodes alongside hand-painted ribbons, pulling the eye into optical scenes akin to the paintings. As she masters painting and collage, then sculpture, Gueorguieva’s work is connected to modernism as she forges ahead to produce a new body of work rich with historical antecedents.

The figure becomes more present and integral in Gueorguieva’s new paintings and sculptures.

It’s a slurring, shattered form in a broken space, a sort of gelatin post-cubist shambles. As the viewer’s glance shifts, the fractures appear to multiply. Figures or groupings of bodies in paint, concrete, or clay recur. Gueorguieva’s anatomical armatures reinforce themselves as statuettes.

My Own Folly is a massive tour-de-force of paint and collage, where distinctive fractures float within an illusionistic space. The structures that tower on the right recall Pablo Picasso’s analytic investigations yet employ the fury of the Fauvist pallet. The connection to the Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann is also tangible, especially to his Provincetown works from the 1930s – 1940s,

7

8

in which he transformed architectural figuration into an abstract, hyperactive field. Such vitality exemplifies Hofmann’s push-pull theory, where “Push answers with the corresponding equivalent of pull, and pull correspondingly with push.”1 A similar assemblage of color, form, and calligraphic line appears in My Own Folly’s foreground before dissolving into long planes of magenta. Gueorguieva’s multi-layered planes, like Hofmann’s, push, pull, counterattack, and pulse with dynamic energy.

Between 1953 and 1955, the Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner created a series of black-andwhite paper-and-canvas collages by unstretching, slashing, cutting up, and reassembling. In Milkweed (1955), for example, ominous black orbs hovered and intermingled with elongated white planes on a quiet painted surface. In that work, Krasner applied a new layer of oil paint to the pieces of recycled paper fragments and slashed canvas, which resulted in layered composition. The painting’s surface was destroyed, and the frame was no longer a window; it was an object and a body.

Gueorguieva has done similar work using slashed layers of muslin, which she discussed in a 2014 interview: It [muslin] serves to double up the surface—since the pieces are already patterned, colored, textured, and then since they get laid on in specific forms, the second surface paints the first—but it’s still surface. What’s interesting about this is the inevitable slippage between

Hans Hofmann Untitled No. 24, c. 1935 Oil on panel 25 x 30 inches 63.5 x 76.2 cm © 2016 The Renate, Hans & Maria Hofmann Trust / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

Lee Krasner Milkweed, 1955 Oil, paper, and canvas collage on canvas 82 3/8 x 57 3/4 inches 209.2 x 146.7 cm © 2016 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

those surfaces, the inevitable mistakes, and wrinkles, the uncontrollability of the fabric compared to the brush. And yet the fabric often mimics the brush and acts as a faux expressive mark, which up close is actually a rather clunky ripped or cut piece of fabric. 2

Iva Gueorguieva The Battle of San Romano, 2011 Mixed media 120 x 136 inches 304.8 x 345.4 cm

Gueorguieva also cites Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Conrad Marca-Relli as early spurs for thought. Each of these artists challenged notions of what painting should be and raised collage to the scale and complexity of monumental painting.

From the 1940s to the 1960s, Lucio Fontana began puncturing paper and canvas. The hole became his signature gesture, and two- and three-dimensionality started feeding into and out of one another. For Fontana, as for Gueorguieva, the puncture, slash, and cut became agents and presences. “I have constructed, not destroyed,” said Fontana.3 Alberto Burri’s constructions of the 1950s consisted of little or no paint; instead, his swells and three-dimensional surfaces were a compilation of old sacks and bits of rag and string. Burri’s untreated canvases were progressively built up with cement, sacking, and tempera. He punched holes in his canvases, referencing wounds and holes inflicted on actual bodies. He further fastened branches or wires under the canvas to produce slight humps and strains within the substrate, further exaggerating the connection between the body of the painting and his own body.4 From 2009 to 2011, Gueorguieva created a series of paper and muslin constructions, unstretched and hovering directly off the wall. The Battle of San Romano (2011) references Conrad

9

10

Marca-Relli’s The Battle (1956) and Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano in 1432 (commissioned by the Bartolini Salimbeni family in Florence sometime between 1435 and 1460). Gueorguieva’s Battle of San Romano is formed of a series of painted and dyed pieces of collaged canvas, recalling Marca-Relli’s style of abstract collage where he attaches biomorphically-shaped pieces of painted or dyed canvas to the picture’s surface in The Battle. Her edges are pinned and glued, leaving the space beneath them to breathe and swell.

When Gueorguieva—then a graduate student visiting the Metropolitan Museum in New York—first saw a painting by the Abstract Expressionist Marca-Relli, it further steered her toward collage. Marca-Relli saw collage as a way of painting. “It was the clearest way I could find to get the edges of the volumes that I wanted to delineate,” Marca-Relli said. “It also gave me the possibility of working over and over a painting without it getting stale, because each time you add a piece it is fresh.”5 Gueorguieva spreads paper and fabric on her studio floor, where she paints, stains, and cuts the pieces into distinct shapes before transferring them on to canvas. Over the course of weeks or months, she “struggles with the urgency to formally resolve areas of the paintings and the compulsion to paint on a separate piece of muslin and glue it rather abruptly on to the canvas.”6 For Gueorguieva, “The collage continuously disrupts and destroys the illusionistic integrity of the painting, but every subsequent response of my brush seeks to

Conrad Marca-Relli The Battle, 1956 Oil cloth, tinted canvas, enamel paint, and oil on canvas 70 1/2 x 130 1/2 inches 179.1 x 331.5 cm © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY / Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma

Paolo Uccello The Battle of San Romano in 1432 (The Counterattack of Micheletto da Cotignola) Three panels Distemper on wood 70 9/10 x 124 2/5 inches 180 x 316 cm © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

Erich Heckel Bathers among the reeds (Badende im Schilf), 1909 Oil on canvas 27 7/10 x 31 1/2 inches 70.5 x 80 cm © Nachlass Erich Heckel / Museum Kunstpalast / ARTOTHEK / 2016 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

restore that lost illusion. This process goes on and on, until there is both a material presence and an illusionistic space. The eye of the viewer trips on the cut edges of the collage, and that tactile experience pushes one back into physical or sculptural space.”7 The result is not wholly abstract, since characters continue to inhabit these spaces. The figures are hybrid—part symbol, part gesture, part structure. For Gueorguieva, “the paintings become a space where the figures ‘do things.’”8 In such instances, a figure or a pair become active participants, who live, sit, and dwell within her nonrepresentational scenes. At times, they appear static cemented within her dynamic geometries. At others, the figure is portrayed in the act of movement, furthering the push-pull energy of her compositions. According to the artist, “... the figure pushes to the surface and collapses into a landscape.”9 In January of 2016, Gueorguieva spent time in the high desert near Los Angeles, hiking and drawing. In Desert Willow, a discrete figure squats close to the ground, her hands busy.

Above the figure, yellow strokes suggest desert warmth and aridity; next to it, repeated shapes and layers create abstract, apparently living desert vegetation.

In West Drift, multiple characters populate the landscape, from an orange static figure gazing toward a shimmering horizon to a blue and yellow pair who stand gently swinging their arms, heads tilted down in the foreground. Like Erich Heckel’s bathers in Bathers among the reeds (1909), the characters are isolated and confined, strangers to one another.

11

Reading like personal transcriptions, Gueorguieva’s recent pictures present her own connection with the high desert landscape, in much the way that Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series reflects his relationship with Santa Monica, California.

Curator Sarah Bancroft argues that Diebenkorn’s works are a “personal synthesis of his own decisions, attitudes, and process within a particular microcosm to which he was sensitive.”10 Diebenkorn repeatedly worked and reworked pictures—scrapping and repainting, analyzing, layering geometric forms and congruent planes into all-over spatial relationships. A similar, constructive vulnerability facilitates Gueorguieva’s sculptures, like the Talisman Debris series of 2012, revisited in 2016.

12

I started constructing these objects because I always saw the surface of the paintings as a skin full of vitality and history rather than as a passive, empty space open and ready to absorb my mark making. I wanted to hold, pull, stretch, wrap and twist the surface while I simultaneously applied color and line. The intertwining of the materials with the surface reveals the tension between the two.

That tension is generative within the painting process but also connects me to the stuff of real life, to the human body and to the body of the landscape surrounding it.11 As they alternate between painting and sculpture, these skeleton-like sculptures also reference the 1914 constructions of Vladimir Tatlin, who was concerned with breaking boundaries between genres.

Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park #94, 1976 Oil on canvas 93 1/8 x 81 1/8 inches 236.5 x 206.1 cm © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation

Iva Gueorguieva Talisman Debris: Shield, 2012 Acrylic, collage, paper, muslin, and wood 81 x 35 x 5 inches 205.7 x 88.9 x 12.7 cm

Muscular and solid, the recent sculpted figures are analogous to her painted characters. They stand upright or recline in pairs. They are intimate in scale and made of simple materials, such as collected wood and dead Joshua tree fragments that are later cast in concrete. When she discussed the process, Gueorguieva admitted to enjoying “the witchy aspect of the transformation from flesh into stone.”12 For Gueorguieva, the formal consequences of the collapse of 2-D, 3-D, painting, sculpture, surface, body, figure, and space contain political implications. It is not only or primarily in the world of “virtual reality,” she seems to suggest, that viewers and realities intertwine, that bodies and conn structions live in a continuity. It’s in materiality itself. This realization is a source of vitality.

(Endnotes) 1. Sam Hunter and Hans Hofmann, Hans Hofmann (New York: Harry N. Abrams , 1963), p. 44.

2. David Louis Norr, “Where to Find Beautiful Monsters,” Iva Gueorguieva (New York: Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, 2014), p. 54.

3. Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept: Expectations, 1960, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. http://www.moma.org/collection/ works/79874?locale=en 4. Milton Gendel, “ ‘I Will Not Be a Sunday Painter’: Alberto Burri Makes a Picture, In 1954,” ArtNews, October 9, 2015. http://bit.ly/ ArtNewsBurri 5. Conrad Marca-Relli, video interview, date unknown. http://bit.ly/MarcaRelli-Interview 6. Iva Gueorguieva, email message to the author, April 26, 2016.

7. Iva Gueorguieva, email message to the author, May 3, 2016.

8. Norr, “Where to Find Beautiful Monsters,” p. 53.

9. Iva Gueorguieva, notes to the author written about a Miami exhibition, January 20, 2016.

10. Sarah Bancroft, “A View of Ocean Park,” in Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, (New York: Del Monico Books, Prestel, 2011) p. 16.

11. Iva Gueorguieva, email message to the author, May 3, 2016.

12. Iva Gueorguieva, note to the author, May 4, 2016.

Jaime DeSimone is a Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville.

13

14

Scuttled Trophies, 2014 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 100 x 80 inches 254 x 203.2 cm

16

Ghost of Water, 2014 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas (diptych) 120 x 142 inches 304.8 x 355.6 cm

18

Crouching Woman, 2015 Acrylic, oil, and collage on linen 70 x 45 inches 177.8 x 114.3 cm

20

Strata, 2015 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 80 x 100 inches 203.2 x 254 cm

22

An Orange Shadow Slithering, 2015 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 80 x 100 inches 203.2 x 254 cm

24

Talisman Debris, 2016 Acrylic and collage on canvas, wood and steel 90 x 68 x 26 inches 228.6 x 172.7 x 66 cm

26

One Single Catastrophe, 2016 Acrylic, oil, and collage on paper mounted on canvas 38 x 30 inches 96.5 x 76.2 cm

28

Nestinarka, 2016 Acrylic, oil and collage on canvas 40 x 32 inches 101.6 x 81.3 cm

30

Choreograph, 2016 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 65 x 65 inches 165.1 x 165.1 cm

32

My Own Folly, 2016 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 80 x 100 inches 203.2 x 254 cm

34

Scavenging Hull, 2016 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 80 x 100 inches 203.2 x 254 cm

36

West Drift, 2016 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 80 x 100 inches 203.2 x 254 cm

38

Desert Willow, 2016 Acrylic, oil, and collage on paper mounted on canvas 58 x 90 inches 147.3 x 228.6 cm

40

Creek, 2016 Softground with hand-painting and oil stick on welded steel frame with rebar, cast Hydro-Stone, cast concrete and epoxy clay 35 x 19 x 13 inches 88.9 x 48.3 x 33 cm

42

Forest, 2016 Softground with hand-painting and oil stick on welded steel frame with rebar, cast Hydro-Stone, cast concrete and epoxy clay 26 3/4 x 13 x 12 1/2 inches 67.9 x 33 x 31.8 cm

44

Eagle Tomb, 2016 Softground with hand-painting and oil stick on welded steel frame with rebar, cast Hydro-Stone, cast concrete and epoxy clay 28 3/4 x 16 x 15 1/2 inches 73 x 40.6 x 39.4 cm

46

Peddler of Limbs, 2016 Hand-painting and oil stick on welded steel frame with rebar, cast Hydro-Stone, cast concrete and epoxy clay 25 1/4 x 15 x 17 1/2 inches 64.1 x 38.1 x 44.5 cm

48

Green Man, 2016 Softground with hand-painting and oil stick on welded steel frame with rebar, cast Hydro-Stone, cast concrete and epoxy clay 48 1/2 x 15 1/2 x 21 inches 123.2 x 39.4 x 53.3 cm

50

Couple at Rest, 2016 Welded steel frame with rebar, cast Hydro-Stone, and cast concrete 23 x 35 x 15 inches 58.4 x 88.9 x 38.1 cm

52

Soot, 2016 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 65 x 65 inches 165.1 x 165.1 cm

54

The Gardener, 2016 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 65 x 65 inches 165.1 x 165.1 cm

Shadow of Work in Words

by Matthew Scott McGarvey

Paintings

56

Choreograph The title Choreograph references dance, but also the “chora” of post-structuralist philosophy: material primordiality. The term “chora” derives from the ancient Greek name for the space outside the city walls; matter/space not yet patterned by socioeconomic function … also the space through which any attacker arrives. To “choreograph,” then, is to impart patterns of motion and stillness to a waiting, unformed tissue. Or it is to allow the tendencies of a land and a space to speak in gestures that move toward language. In Choreograph, a set of individually contained lives or events hover, simultaneously linked and dissociated by the event of a tragic and beautiful landscape. At center, an obelisk circled by a dog that may wish to mark it hovers on a swatch of blue sky or a photograph of sky. Its motionless quality—object and symbol and sculpture—operates by relation/exclusion with the pulsing mass of ripping yellow on the bottom left. Here, motion is produced by fragmentation and oscillation. Literally, the movement required of the eye is built into the operative effect. The black obelisk hovers in the sky, and the yellow shrapnel figures ripple in echo with the background, as functions of one another. There exists a sort of preestablished (dis)harmony of parts in which the viewers and their memories are included, though left in their own peculiar isolation.

Scavenging Hull Scavenging Hull is a seamless synthesis of indefinite contradictions. If read as a post-cubist compilation of times, it might be all the thoughts of one brilliant, troubled body in motion, or all the moments

of one troubled motion in the process of explosion. Wordless with hints of calligraphy, day on the right, night on the left—night under shelter, obliteration by day. Simultaneous onslaught and tragic capitulation, but also their serial separation (as with the individual pages of a book). A rescue expedition that is doomed, not only because it, itself, is lost, but also because there is nowhere for it to return should it be found.

Nestinarka Another version of synthesis, of geometry with tissue, and of spatial relations with the promiscuous proliferation of light. Simple tricks—bright and hard-edged advances, dim and soft-edged retreats— are presented like sculptures in a museum with its roof blown off. The whole arrangement in this display is as terse as a slap in the face: The nonverbal words perform a staccato sentence that ends horribly fast. Red red blackwhite blackwhite red. The levitating elements are suspended and not quite dead, and clinging yet to accomplices, excuses, justifications, all of which remain doomed to perpetual periphery, yet a periphery that is nauseatingly frontal.

West Drift Once on the Aegean, they had a war in the name of a watching woman who afterward died. Before she died, she saw her attendants’ torsos ripped in half with bright ribs ringing out, she packed a box of blood, she buried it in the earth, and she saw the green gateway to the world of proud riders float away in her mind. What did she think with her head folded back as the ships burned away into evening? What did she build with the sunset-lit timbers all burned in the corpse-laden sand? It all passed her by, as the wind took the water and then took her as well.

My Own Folly In a large miscellaneous pile at the entrance to the valley were found 17 glowing objects, six dangerously sharp ones, two dead angels, a well, the trails of unknown snakes, partially solidified dawn-light, a speechless and a faceless girl. By the pile was a door made of water bisected by an unpinned tightrope, along which ran a certain twittering bird folded from an ink-drenched newspaper or old-fash-

57

ioned ticker tape or Teletype. Several prior things and one resident alien continued to struggle nearby. A broken-necked totem tumbled desperately down behind a broken sign pointing to certain lost waters. Step in this pile, and your ankles squish and glow with unnatural color, and the snakes are likely to bite.

58

Soot In 1922, Paul Klee painted Twittering Machine, which was a mechanic-bird assemblage making a sound of washed-out blue. It was part mechanism, part nature, part sound. Now Gueorguieva makes a painting, called neither Twittering City of the Dead nor Paradox Machine nor even Book of the Old West Ghost Axis, that has all the parts Klee had, plus African masks, pornography, and the legacy of Romanticism smashed like an old flower. It all seems to take place in a very old book, or within the smell of that book, or as the result of a book containing prescient diagrams of tomorrow’s sudden war. Sheets of bent metal form shields; ripped off heads whose bodies still copulate tell stories in backwards words. All is lost in an arid mist in which gibberish outruns black, trades with white, and disperses in parchment clouds.

The Gardener Out in the mining hills just past Randsburg, a right-angled old man called Burro dug himself toward death in a shortcut tunnel heading to a vertigo shelf. In his little cottage, he plastered the walls with newspaper collage. Perhaps this was found there: a photo of the broken woman with finger legs, a paranoid map of a paper golem summoned from inside the mountain and merged with the searing, spinning, sheering discs of uncut light that arrive out of total darkness. He smoked perhaps, and looked at it, and confused his thoughts with the jumbles of planes on the walls of his flame-lit tunnel. Golem man/broken woman/tree mind/scatter body/floored heart ‌ a static overlap always almost going; that bright light like powder razors cutting the ink-dark retina. He smoked there and drank his coffee, and when he stood up only his legs unbent. Now the place is mostly boarded, covered with dust, and the only hint of any shine or any mirror is in this little trick of the wallpaper.

Sculptures Peddler of Limbs Peacefully dead knight with all limbs and skin blown off, calmly retreated to the endless day-night of rocks and wind.

Eagle Tomb Self-certain sexless elephant child brandishing vaginal shield.

Forest An arrangement of three sticks magically blocking three roads, behind which three things happen.

Creek Dancer slices through rock; time petrifies gesture.

Green Man Two characters from two times meet. One time is rhythmic and green, punctual and purposive. One is seamless and grey, curved and limitless. These two times together make a sound that combines the slice of a blade with the fall of a corpse, and these two figures together form an agent who kills without murder or murders without sound.

Couple at Rest And this last one is, in fact, a sarcophagus impaled by a petrified life.

Matthew Scott McGarvey is a Sound Artist and Professor of Critical Theory living and working in Los Angeles, California.

59

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

IVA GUEORGUIEVA 8 September – 8 October 2016 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe 525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com Publication © 2016 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe All rights reserved Essay © 2016 Sarah Bay Gachot Essay © 2016 Jaime DeSimone Essay © 2016 Matthew Scott McGarvey 60

Photography by Christopher Burke Studios, New York, NY Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-4951-3016-8 Cover: Desert Willow (detail), 2016 Iva Gueorguieva would like to thank Margaret Miller, Graphicstudio, Emette Rivera, and reMADE Studios for their invaluable assistance.

AMERINGER McENERY YOHE

62

AMERINGER M c E N E RY YO H E