Andrea Rodriguez Novoa
Barcelone

Geneva, 25th February 2019,

Dear Pauline,

Long time no see!
I hope your projects are taking shape and that everything is going for the best.
Over here the building work on my house is coming along and to my comings and goings between France and Spain has been added a collaboration that brings me often to Geneva. Seeing as I don’t have your capacity to cross borders in a figured and sensitive way I must move physically.
I admit that it complicates things somewhat, but it’s OK.

When we met I was working on my novel From the deconstruction of space to the era of metamodernism, linking the notion of deconstruction and the premises of metamodernism through the performativity of text. Perhaps since I was plunged into these thoughts, your whole body of work seemed to echo these ideas.
I’ll explain.
In Notes on Metamodernism (2010) the Dutch writers Thimotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker defend the idea of neo-romanticism: a return from the typically modern without losing post-modern mentalities. They refer to Jas Van Ader, Peter Doig or Catherig Opie, to only cite artists. I pondered these thoughts in the train between Barcelona and Toulouse. Once I arrived at yours, eating home-made cakes, I looked at your living-room, full of your works despite its not being your workshop.
Suddenly it hit me like a eureka effect:

Pauline Zenk is a meta-modern artist!

From that point all of your words resounded within this prism. You are a romantic and practical at the same time, your work constantly repositions itself between modern utopia and post-modern dystopia, of a sensitivity that is neither one or the other, between a desire for universal truths and apolitical existentialism. Between hope and doubt, sincerity and irony, knowledge and ingenuity.
You told me about Germany, China, Spain, Columbia, Brazil, at last France. Temporal order and spatial disorder confused in your “live and work”, I found you to be meta-atopic, from neither here nor there but…beyond. One thing you said marked me: “We are here, elsewhere and nowhere so History is not objective but it makes us dream”.

In my head the words of the Dutch: “…meta-modern man/woman’s destiny is to follow a horizon that will forever extinguish itself.”.

We started by talking about memory, which is your way of making History into a source of inspiration. Of memory, then, because it is a big part of what occupies you and since for my visit chance had me perform a crossing, of which you speak in your project “Gravitation” (2017). “La Retirada” was the exodus of the refugees crossing the border between France and Spain starting in February 1939 – especially from Catalonia to the Pyrénées-Orientales – after general Franco’s victory. It seems logical to me that this triggered the “Gravitation” project since I was to discover that it exists following on from “Memoria migratoria” (2015-2016) about European immigration in the South of Brazil.
Together they adapt to an extensive research, a range of thought on national and cultural identity. About loss and fear but also the energy and the courage in migration, showing “many characters that float between borders with their feet on one side and their heart on the other” as you say.

In these classically made paintings a very contemporary diversion operates by the erasing of certain parts of the image, by dashes of political red, protagonists that are un-drawn because they are anonymous. They become a representation of these bodies that are no longer there and the essence of the social body they then shape. Gathered among others under the revealing title REMEMBERING, these projects concern History in an abstract manner. This is how, by not giving all the facts, your paintings are strengthened by the collective memory they then construct. In the same way a parallel with today’s migratory movements is obvious since I agree, History repeats itself and belongs to us all. The idea of neo-romanticism arises again here in its affective sense, in that micro-history crafts your research as much as your intellectual reflections.

This gaze is pushed to the extreme in the block of projects SEEING and makes me think that all your paintings are somehow portraits. The models on your canvases – taken from photographs and postcards, people or not – are representations of a self that seems to want to escape, that is not – or no longer – present. These portraits thus promise photographic images whose focus would have been deliberately lost and that – backwards – you turn into painting in order to better transmit emotion by way of hand, mistake and matter. Studying your portfolio confirmed this feeling. The header of the document was a quote: Things do not exist unto themselves, but only in representation.  (David Hockney).

I found the transition to BODIES, the third part of your work, of great coherence. Your last projects precipitate in an incarnate manner thoughts you before have deeply explored and you print onto them an almost sculptural charge by its contents, all the while delivering us paintings, drawings, texts. As a whole, the works make up one body of work that is coherent because it is disparate. It echoes like a collection of postcards or photographs picked up at an antiques shop, whose unknown faces have a family resemblance. After the selection none of the pictures remain focused in our minds but we keep a trace of all of them since what is being built is a collective, not an individual, memory.

I particularly appreciated the subtle but asserted link between two of your projects. “Don’t forget to resist” (2018) includes among other things a publication you gave to me. Flipping through it, the illustrious feminists the book enumerates assume the role of as many increased tributes to suffering and assassinated women in Brittany, who you in turn honour in “Et les femmes” (2016-2018). Micro-history once again wins the battle against History.         

I said all of this to myself on my way home. I said to myself that you are meta-modern: a historian turned painter with polymorphic languages. I told myself we were members of the resistance.

With no further delay I shall leave you with my best thoughts, and wait for you in Barcelona where you are more than welcome. Maybe we need to imagine the Retirada the other way round? In all the ways?

Love
Andrea

Translated from the French by Matilda Holloway