Audrey Guttman: Tsimtsoum
Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Brussels BE & Ketabi Bourdet, on the occasion of Art Brussels 2023
19.4 - 6.5.23
Audrey Guttman, Autoportrait à l’Échiquier, 2023
According to Kabbalistic cosmogony, Tsimtsoum refers to the first in a sequence of processes that led to the creation of the world. Before the beginning, there was only the ein sof, a single infinite unity of divine presence. To make room for finite, distinctive worlds to exist, God had to contract, or conceal, his infinite light. Then, in the first realm of Chaos, he emanated his light into ten vessels, thereby shattering them. The resulting shards, now coated in this divine luminescence, showered down into the next realm of Repair, where through their reconstruction, a connection to the divine may be restored.
Audrey Guttman’s new body of work conceptually and formally explores the paradoxes inherent to the notion of tsimtsoum to interrogate the very processes of artistic creation and spiritual awakening: the necessary dualities of absence and presence, contraction and creation, darkness and light. The tripartite cycle of revelation-destruction-repair is echoed again and again across religions and cultures, from Zen Buddhism to Jungian psychology. Here, it finds a near perfect analogy in the material process of collage, in which an infinite sea of symbols must be discerningly sifted through, cut apart, and reassembled to reveal new meaning.
As the tsimtsoum demonstrates, beginnings never take place quite at the beginning. Audrey Guttman knows this. Working with a vast archive of images, carefully culled over the years from vintage books, magazines, advertisements, and so on, she creates new fields of meaning across an array of media and processes. “Nothing comes from nothing”, she tells me on a recent visit to her studio, referring both to the carpet of cut-outs on the table before her and her view on the construction of individual identity and experience.
The Kabbalah deals heavily in metaphor, encouraging the interpretation of its messages on multiple registers, from the global metaphysical to the personal emotional and psychological, embodying the belief that the divine intersects all things in the universe. Similarly, Guttman’s practice, nourished by poetry, philosophy, psychology, theology, is deeply entwined with her way of being in the world, and her quest to make sense of it.
Light emerges as a central motif and medium throughout this exhibition. Here, Guttman experimented with cyanotype printing – a means of effectively painting with light and time. Imagining the cyanotype object as a vessel of light, the technical process echoes the narrative of tsimtsoum. The cyanotype’s rich blue tone– a hue with many spiritual and healing connotations – is a reaction to direct light exposure. The images that appear on the page in shades of white only emerge through the restriction of light to those areas, mirroring the concealment of the divine infinite light that gave rise to finite forms.
This spatial dialectic – concealing to reveal, withdrawing to expand – is also bound up in a temporal dimension, alluded to by the presence of time-measuring systems in the exhibition. Jacques Derrida referred to time as “the element of invisibility itself”, in that its accumulation can only be perceived in its depletion, a paradox formally harnessed by a glazed stoneware candle-clock and the large-scale image of an 18th century alarm system set against a desolate landscape.
Nevertheless, all work necessitates a beginning, a gambit – a defining first word, mark, or gesture from which all else will follow. But how to chart a course outside the established logics of space and time? Audrey Guttman’s oneiric compositions seem to find a way around this dilemma. Her paper-based alter egos, teleported into dreamy landscapes of infinite blue, roam amongst candles and chess boards, looking for answers in the light. Answers that, perhaps, were in the question, all along.
Melanie Scheiner