Ophelia Rosa

Janaína Tschäpe has worked with the landscape recurrently throughout her career. She has described her film, photographic and performance works as attempts to insert herself into it as an object; in her paintings she mobilises landscape both as an art historical category, and a catalyst for memory.

Building on this latter perspective, she has articulated an interest in the idea of landscape as memory, and sees its evocation in art as a locus through which personal registers of the more intimate and sensory details associated with place might be unlocked. In particular, her paintings often recall the various environments in which her performative and photographic works have been situated. The different elements of her practice are thus connected by the activation of her memory through painting, where painting is viewed as a medium offering the correct material and temporal circumstances for the external development of imagery from a primarily insular space.

Art historian Annette Bhagwati identifies the philosophic origin of this dimension of Tschäpe’s practice, writing “instead of chronicling outer, physical landscapes she examines her memories, her inner after-images of … landscapes by way of a painterly, visual approach: a sustained dialogue with the materiality of her media—paper, brush, canvas, oil, watercolour—gives rise to compositions that evoke a sense of deeply-layered memory. The artworks’ overt expressivity notwithstanding, they come about through an act of profound contemplation and inner exploration. This artistic approach is romantic in a truly authentic sense.”

Ophelia Rose (2015) depicts what appears to be a lake or swamp formed from a variety of media and techniques overlaid on canvas, and is one of many aquatic scenes conjured by the artist. The vast white space at the top of the painting is contrasted with its lower half, which is made up of organic shapes, drip marks and drawn sections in green and blue that supply the image with impressions of grasses and other plant life. The vague division of the work into these two sections is given further form by the horizon of the water’s surface, implied by the faint suggestion of a line in the painting’s background. The continuity of lengthy deposits of dripped paint and drawn marks which run over that line hint at the water’s reflectivity and masked depth. Tschäpe’s pronouncement of such uncertainty in representations of water or horizon is a common feature of her work. In fact, she seizes upon the qualitative effect of the unknown for her work, viewing each blank canvas as an opportunity for exploration and confrontation with the self, set before expanse.

— Elsa Gray