Open Painting
1. Hypnosis
“Art is to create a kind of machine to hypnotize another person to transmit experiences that do not translate into perceptible facts, art is hypnosis”, Mario Levrero.
Two friends are on vacation in a cabin. During the night a big storm approaches, isolates them and they are left in the middle of the landscape without any communication. They have food, they have drink, they lack nothing, but they are isolated. They cannot go out, they cannot talk to the outside world, there is no “signal”. Nothing is serious, but everything is different in isolation. One of them practices hypnotism, the other doesn’t believe in it.
After reading everything they took and playing cards and chatting, the one who knows how to hypnotize, as a game, proposes to her to give herself to the practice. After several failed attempts, the one who does not believe goes into a hypnotic trance. In these (brief) moments, the woman narrates what appears to be the landscapes around her, where she is, almost like a travel chronicle. The hypnotized woman describes scenes, situations, elements and architectures, strange images that are not clearly understood, but that the author of these trances writes meekly on a pad of white paper.
Every time she wakes up, convinced that she has never been hypnotized, she smiles, like someone who wins a game, however, the one who saw her telling everything, keeps silent and tells her that she wants to insist, because she knows that the mystery is greater than the affirmation.
They were several days of confinement, while the road conditions improved, there were many stories that she described, without even knowing it. The friend wrote down everything, creating an intimate diary that was not hers but rather someone else’s…
2. The Garage
To visit the studio of Carina Winschel (La Pampa, Argentina, 1971), you have to enter a garage, get around the cars parked there, go through a hidden door, climb a staircase, and go upstairs.
a hidden door, climb a staircase and, finally, enter a white, very white space. You can hear Eric Satie, the space shows his architectural studies, everything is orderly and harmonious. The semi-industrial ceilings reminiscent of the garage are now the frame of an immense production of work on walls and floor.
on walls and floor. Otto’s doghouse, his beloved Terrier, is there with his red ball. There is also something pictorial in that doghouse.
Before seeing his works (although I already knew his production) we sat down to have some mates and chat.
To talk about his childhood is also to talk about his work: “There were no adults in my childhood, my parents worked all day and I escaped to discover EVERYTHING. I was wild, a sponge that looked at everything, I was always curious”. And that EVERYTHING she refers to is in her beautiful and disturbing paintings. It seems that Carina (Carilo, as she calls herself) in her paintings relates everything that her eyes treasured and treasure.
When she speaks of her painting, she speaks of survival. The work becomes a tool. She says: “Everything is equally important” and it shows in her works.
3. White
“Even if the general construction (of a work) can be achieved by pure theory, the element that constitutes the true essence of creation is intuition”, Wassily Kandinsky, Of the Spiritual in Art (1911).
There is a first and a second and a third impression when viewing his works. His energetic strokes, his polychrome, his restless soul and his vibrant colors, can lead to the first impression: an impulsive and almost cathartic work. However, in the second layer (impression), what is seen is something deep and silent, a still plot, a bottomless lagoon, full of life, but silent. There are no nerves, but pulsation. There is a light that crosses that lagoon, the foliage, the forests, the structures, the animals. That light that penetrates the framework is Carina’s light and that light changes EVERYTHING (that word again), it is that light (I repeat) that leads us in a precise way to enter her dreamlike and spiritual world. Magical.
The third layer is to find it sitting down, and stay for a long time, because there you will find the best kept secrets.
When Jorge Luis Borges spoke of the paintings of William Turner, the painter who remained engraved in his retina before he lost his sight, he said that although it is true that the painter’s theme was nature (fire, stones, the sea, trees and fog), the protagonist of his works was THE WEATHER. Well, this is also true of Carina López Winschel’s work.
4. Hypnosis (2)
Hypnosis: method to produce artificial sleep, by means of personal influence. To fascinate, to astonish someone, to attract, to seduce, to bewitch, to captivate, to bewitch.
The storm passed and finally, they were able to leave the cabin. The notepad was full, as if in passing, and before they said goodbye to this particular trip, the friend handed her the notes without telling her the contents or how they were taken. The friend kept them in a distracted way in the excitement of being able to get out of isolation. The notebook was never opened or read, but something strange happened after that. The woman who had never been hypnotized before began to feel a change, staring at a hare, the hare was astonished, in a state of contemplation, the same thing happened with birds, dogs and cats. He noticed to his surprise that he could hypnotize. No one knows if he practices it with humans, but it is known that his gaze is powerful, magnetic, and that he has now begun to paint.
Nushi Muntaabski
Buenos Aires, March 2024
