Peter Webber Essay 2010

I am daydreaming after looking at Rachel Schwalm's latest exhibition.

Rachel is a figure in some long-lost Antonioni movie. She is motionless, dressed head to toe in black. She stands alone in a Renaissance church in some forlorn and lonely Italian provincial town, escaping the heat and glare of the piazza outside.

Once inside the cool, sepulchral interior, she catches sight of something on the far wall.

A splash of light illuminates a votive painting.

Her eyes not yet adjusted to the dark, its precise contours are somehow indistinct.

She sees instead a glowing intensity. Muted colours swirling, emerging out of the darkness. Inchoate. Mysterious.

Rachel's gift is to be able to capture such moments of fleeting visual acuteness, of aesthetic longing. She creates a sense of the intangible, using what seem to be the most tangible of materials. Stone, steel, marble, and glass. A handful of intensely worked and layered pigment. Some plucked chalk lines.

The finished results have an otherworldly quality to them. Panels or distorted pools of pure colour, worked and re-worked until they achieve a lunar-like texture.

And now I see her in another movie. She is revealed as one of Andrei Tarkovsky's cosmonauts from Solaris. Helplessly marooned in outer space, haunted by dreams and memories.

A view of a distant planet below. Eddying clouds and a boiling sea. A dim, pulsing light struggling to emerge from some strange and far-off nebula.

The windows and the lenses she painstakingly constructs reveal startling views. Ghostly traces of another dimension. They are portals to an indistinct, troubled world.

A distant limbo.

Yet these dark visions emerge from an altogether different environment, a world of smooth, calm stone.

Cold. Distant. Elegant.

An absence of colour and drama.

Mute and restrained.

Their geometry is immaculate. Measurements divided and repeated with mathematical precision. A meticulous display of divine proportions. Fibonacci: the prince of numbers, would be proud.

And it is in the collision of these two worlds, the chaotic and the geometric, that Rachel weaves her magic.

Some of these pieces look like they have had their cool exteriors chiselled and opened up for our inspection, revealing something far more ancient, murky and complex than might otherwise have been imagined.

A view that was hidden from us, until patiently excavated by Rachel. Fragments and ruins from an undreamt of civilization.

An archaeology of unease.

Other pieces seem to reveal a palimpsest of what was once there, an age before.

The restless aura belonging to some long departed figure.

A golden icon painted by Andrei Rublev that has long since crumbled into dust.

(Perhaps the very same icon that can be seen in Safaris.)

The ghost of a Rembrandt portrait whose subject has faded away into abstract nothingness.

The power of Rachel Schwalm's art is the way it affects the viewer. These pieces are like beautiful and ornate Rorschach tests of unfathomable solidity and complexity.

These are the images and the visions that dance through my head when I look at her work. Yet I doubt they are the same images and visions that you will see, if you are really looking.

That is the beauty of it, and of them.

Peter Webber 20 I 0

Film director (Girl with a Pearl Earring)

Roger Graef OBE 2007

TS Eliot when asked about the meaning of the Waste Land said ‘If I could have written it any other way, I would have done’

Trying to write about Rachel Schwalm's haunting, mysterious work is not just a verbal challenge, it is a contradiction in forms. Each of her images are challenges in themselves. They defy easy explanation, or even categorization. But they draw you in. They invite you to ask questions about her intentions. about the meaning of the diverse but distinctive textures, colours and shapes she produces.

She talks of echoes, of marks, of traces, of putting colour and light to emotions? Eliot – one of Rachel's favourites - wrote 'Birth and copulation and death, that's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks. There are hints pointing us, drawing us, luring us into the limbo of her lively and fertile imagination. But she never explicitly answers that question. It remains out of reach.

Deconstructing her methods and influences merely compound the enigma. But they are interesting in themselves. Her works are done with mathematical precision, using mathematical principles: drawn, carved, marked and hewn she uses chalk plumb lines to proportion and scale up her inserts into larger panels of stone. Yet they seem much more hand wrought, as they are. They show none of the rigid formulaic patterning of painters like Bridget Riley or Vasarely. She will do thirty or forty levels of 'distressing of her materials to create a feeling of perspective even on otherwise flat surfaces, to give us what she calls ‘a glimpse into another layer.’

She mixes materials in such original ways that they defy labels. They are assemblages, with qualities of sculpture and painting combined. Some are hidden behind glass in case we are getting too close to understanding them. There are no narratives in her work – other than one’s own journey into the labyrinth she invites us to explore.

She has Rembrandt’s self portrait peering at her from a postcard as she works away, distressing and measuring and marking up. But no representational images appear under his gaze, only the darkness of his chiaroscuro can be seen in her output – merely hinting at what is off screen, off the map of the unknown world. Her subject is what is not there – a glimpse into the unknown.

Rachel Schwalm is still early in what is already a promising career. Once seen, her work is unforgettable. For me, it echoes Gertrude Stein’s deathbed exchange with her lifelong friend Alice B Toklas. Ms Toklas asked her ‘Gertrude, what’s the answer?’ Ms Stein answered, ‘Alice, what’s the question?’ and died.

I very much doubt that no matter how ling Rachel lives and works that we will ever find the answer.  But the questions she poses inside every piece, resonate in one’s own head ling afterwards.

Kafka once said it was the job of fiction to put an ice pick in the brain. Rachel does that with her work. In our post-modern age of easy effects by other contemporary artists, Rachel takes us on a much harder path. Because it’s so enigmatic and elusive, the memory of each journey stays in the brain far longer. The ice pick is there.

Roger Graef, OBE
2007