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MYSTICAL EXOTISM – the art of Natalia Jacquounain

"Exoticism is all that is other, it means opening up to the strangeness of the Other and to feel yourself, among others, dressed in a disturbing strangeness."

(Victor Segalen, Essay on exoticism)

Visionary artist, with an authentic and personal style, Natalia Jacquounain brings together a multiplicity of artistic references and existential experiences in her creations.

Among the ideas and influences of the masters of the history of contemporary art, there are three, in our opinion, the great avant-garde including her works, as gems of the same plant - that of Western art – feed: cubism, expressionism and surrealism.

These are references which follow one another in the different creative phases of Natalia Jacquounain, but which are often present at the same time in the same work, rhythmically modulating their areas of aesthetic influence.

The lesson of cubism, in fact, emerges mainly in the geometric resolution of spatial forms and certain compositional details; the expressionist tradition is instead shown in the intensity of the human figures represented, of which it is the emotional side, rather than the descriptive mimesis, that is being studied; finally, the surrealist magisterium intensifies the impalpable dreamlike atmosphere that pervades the canvas.

In particular, if "Surrealism is pure psychic automatism, by which we propose to express (...) the real functioning of thought (...) with the absence of any control exerted by reason, beyond all aesthetic and moral preoccupations "(André Breton), the Jacquounain's work resolves in ethereal and light forms the impulses of the unconscious, with obvious references to the emblematic and the phantasmagorical imagination of Salvador Dalí.

This peculiar stylistic simultaneity can be explored in the artist's more than forty years of creative and exhibition experience - whose numerous personal and collective exhibitions took place in prestigious exhibition contexts, in France, Italy and Switzerland (Basel Art).

Here, various creative strands are proposed, within which the historical references listed above chase each other in a game of dances and references - à la Chagall: from the first fascination for still lifes to the series of paintings "Black Cello" and "Violins d 'autumn "(inspired by an engraving by the English artist William Hogarth), from lively and geometric sculptures to landscapes, from the totemic series of" Urban forest "to the more recent" Goticus "and" Fauselle (or false reality) " greater stylistic and compositional rigor: a drive of a spiritual nature, addressed to the sacred and the numinous (the mysterium tremendum of which Rudolf Otto has left us an admirable description in The sacred).

An investigation, this one, which develops emblematic elements of the exotic and archaic type, in an archetypical typing of key figures of our collective unconscious.

To emerge, it is a search - utopian and nostalgic traits - of this permanent Center that modernity seems to have excluded from its own horizons and the experience of the individual only touches fugely, in the days when the ghosts of their upset souls give way to the angels of the future.

Thus, even when the theme approached in her art is the real, the unique and monotonic responses are rejected with the decision, in favor of contemplating the Mystery: the enigma of being, in which what seems objective turns out to be a dream, while the mirrors, obsessed with the artist, paradoxically announce a dense and concrete reality, cannot be dissolved by art, but only put on display, exhibited.

It is quite simply. "What matters - we can conclude with Ernst Jünger - is not seeing the solution, but the riddle".