The principles of informalism

 

The Principles of informalism

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas, USA

Written in english by Abdel hernandez San juan

   I am hearing someone naming Terrell James, speaking on her in a thirst person and my feeling is depth, Terrell James, Terrell James, it is like saying Mel chin, or Tracy hicks or Grotfeld, a regional, Texas local art which has being always a characteristic of usa art first strongly stablished in cultural regions and later moved through national or international scenarios,

   she is a subtly, delicated and refined woman, whose work communicates something of the soul of a cultural region, Houston-and Texas, she has explored a cultural informalism something unknown yet previously through informalism even in the united states, her work communicates cultural resonances of Texas land and the border culture, but from the individual person interior subjectivity perspective

   We have in Texas two artists with this mud. 

    Cristina Jadic, on the one side, looking to it through bilinguism, her mother and family customs, and Terrell James a unique artist too, an art teacher and editor, exploring the cultural memories not as much through figurative icons as in Christina images or the resonances of matter, but through the pure abstract focusing the organic relation between forms and habitat, forms and the body 

  she have something europeans too, her informalism remains something of the earlier usa informalist turn of the late fifties and sixties—Tombly, tombey, Klein, and something of the earlier european informal expressionism, Kandinsky, klee, however, exploring something new, not as much evolved in paying attention to the mere accidental of the chemistries and effects of pigments informal gestures on canvases –or the illusionism’s possible to be created within it, as Tombey did, nor even a microscopic attention to gestures as clues as Klein did, or like it was in usa sixties when the canvas was conceived as a surface interface to inscribe the clues of unpredictable spontaneity of color, forms and matter, not as much concerned with an idea of the order of cosmogony, religious ecstasies or mere attention to principles of abstract orders such as structures and geometries in earlier Mondrian, or the expression of interior dramas or existential states as it was in Kandinsky or Klee, it is instead another kind informalism more organic in the way it distribute the grammar and sintaxis of elements, forms, colour, tones, atmospheres, elements and backgrounds, etc, 

   Something remains me to be more near to Cezanne because of his attitude to the canvas, even when there is not like in Cezanne figurations not realistic representational images, we should remember that Cezanne was important to cubism when something to be discovered, synthetized and or analyzed while being abstract, Cezanne, for example, he painted the river water with the qualities of the sky or the trips consistency or perhaps he painted tries with the liquid qualities of water fluids exchanging subjects and predicaments, names and qualities, painting the river water as if impregnated by the consistency of tries was not yet regarded to put out or socialize interior expressionists states of the subject dramas, but yet to explore relations between subjectivity feelings and nature

   Something like this can be perceived in Terrell informalism while nor only in regard to nature but to the inmediacy of habitat both to the body as to the soul. This is on the other side, a kind of more philosophical meaning of informalism, in fact, if we really ask ourself on the deeper sense of informalism, its primary regards to human principles, we will note that, like expressionism was ultimately regarded to the basic principle of expressing since childhood, surrealism to imagination, and abstraction, cubism, minimalist and conceptualism, to analysis, synthesis or engineering logarithms, the primary regard of informalism is related alive environment, to life and to habitat. She has clarified and lighted that about in informalism and never before another artist. Why informalism should be here the question, how to answer the regards of informalism to main and basic human principles without confusing it with expressionism and abstractionism which are certainly apparently nears to the informal. Terrell James answered that question as never before

   Terrell work suggest to be or evoque something of the Cezanne attitude to the canvases like cubist painting was, that kind of equilibrium or balance, while at the same time she is not a cubist, but an informalist, there is not only an organic assumption of form, surface or colour by which I mean a relation between her informalism and the body on the one hand meaning with organic something effacing the boundaries between body and its environmental immediacies, habitat and related notions such as custom, habits, everyday rituals, surroundings, but also a very subtly and refined sense of the soul harmony in space and time. Her work should be perceived with details and proximity minuciocity, the form she applies the stein, the calm and composition of forms in the whole, the tones. 

   Her work is not dramatic or theatrical, all the opposite, it is diaphanous and honest

   She is however at the same time, something itself amazing, a field artist, her awareness to field studies and field issues even considered culturally can be defined as really unusual and unique, something explored not in the sense of things done out of the canvases, like for example in her labor as art editor or art teacher, but in her canvas, in the semantique and meanings of her atmospheres and universes. In this sense, she is always over.