CRITICS

Elsie Padilla de Wunderlich
“ 25 YEARS OF SUCCESS IN HER PAINTING”
by Josefina Alonso de Rodríguez

While studying thoroughly the resume of this very well known Guatemalan artist, one feels truly overwhelmed by her pictorial activity kept along 25 years of restless production, which runs from the year 1980 to the year 2005.
Quoting the words of the artists, it was precisely in the year 1976 when she first felt the “call” of art and started to take painting lesson from Miguel Angel Rios (+) who initially shaped her not only in her technique but also in her artistic thought, indicating and reminding her constantly that she should never be carried away by any strange line nor avant - gardism, but only by her own feeling and thoughts. Wise advise.

See More

The names Elsie Padilla Ferguson de Wunderlich, Elsie de Wunderlich or simply Elsie, belong and identify the same talent and the same painter. They didn’t appear yesterday or last week to meet the rough bullring of the national fine arts, where the sharp horns of contempt and mediocrity throw venomous horn thrusts. Elsie has been in this bloodless arena since 1983, and almost twenty years contradict that old tango: twenty years is too much. Especially when they have been supported with serious and tenacious work, without neglecting the technique and language.
While from the trenches of progress the human being is preoccupied and occupied with transforming, contaminating and destroying nature without accepting or respecting the Kyoto protocol and the ecologists’ distress calls; Elsie is involved with a higher and more gratifying mission: to recreate it. Yesterday submerged naked of prejudice and convention in the “Garavitian” waters of Lake Atitlán’s treacherous xocomiles (strong winds) or dressed in the colors of the “Monetian” garden in Giverny. On her incursion into that paradise with no biblical trees or original sins, she is indebted to us. She gave us her summer and fall impressions but left behind a deep immersion without a diving suit into the spring and winter of that garden, so dear to Monet, to impressionism and to universal art.
Elsie doesn’t make unexpected leaps into a void or the exaggerated skips of a circus acrobat. Her path glides on a safe track and she conducts the steering wheel with a firm grip in the midst of existential storms, formal conflicts or stumbling against the rough stones of the pictorial language. Now she comes out of traps set by flowers that devour warm colors, waters of deceptive transparencies and green hells repeated until the infinite. She has refined the hues by caressing them so much with her fingers, the blues are invented skies and in the semi-darkness of insinuated plains the presence of the atom and the galaxy blinks. She lets loose newborn leaves or those turned golden by the fire of late afternoon, to sail into subworlds of liquid dreams in search of submerged cathedrals imagined by Debussy in other latitudes. Those relating to photographic reality sleep locked in a dark prison of virgin film, and discover, cosmonaut with his feet on the ground, the numb certainty at the bottom of the conscience: the truth can also be invented.
She already knows the way, its risks and its shadows, its lights lustered by dawn and the shooting star that hurts the pupil. Her internal compass shows the right course. Here she is with her painting to communicate her emotions to us. She is the painter. Simply Elsie.

Marco Augusto Quiroa
Guatebuenita, May 2001

Elsie de Wunderlich and her zeal for nature

If there is something that distinguishes and makes Elsie de Wunderlich's painting unmistakable, it is in her honesty towards herself, that is, it is she, authentic, she doesn't betray herself, she has her personality. Each artist has his own way of seeing things, and within that range, within that freedom, creates his world and expresses it without limitations, striving to share his emotion, his message, with everyone, without distinctions.

Seeing her work one realizes her zeal and devotion for nature. She takes comfort in the landscape and you can perceive the joy she feels for the freshness of dew, the reflections on water, and the smell of wet earth and of wild woods. The few times she includes the human figure - the exception - it lacks any protagonist desire, its effect is purely complementary. Neither can you foretell any inner turmoil, or any drama as in, for example, Van Gogh. On the contrary, her painting is an invitation for peace and tranquility, free of any conflict. It has nothing to do with the socio-political atmosphere of the moment. Rather, her message could be an appeal for protecting the environment, such is her bucolic disposition, her poetic sensibility, which for me, is intimately related with Diéguez Olaverri's marvelous verses: "The April Afternoons".

On the other hand, it is certain that her technique has depurated considerably. You become aware of her certainty by the way she handles the spatula as well as in the agility of her paint brush: small touches, traces, strokes, spots of color with great texture and chromatic richness. She distances herself more and more from the "finishing touches" and throws herself completely into spontaneity leading to a luminous variation where the line almost doesn't exist. Of course, the influence of the impressionists, especially, Monet, is obvious. Elsie, I think, doesn't pretend to add anything new but simply to be herself. Originality comes by itself and it is the product of many years of work. Elsie is a defined painter and her passion, combined with a tough discipline, allow her to find her own voice naturally, with no deliberateness. As for the rest, no artist is entirely original. We all have multiple debts. Perhaps, the only original artist in an absolute sense, is the caveman. The one who resolved his restlessness through a rite in Altamira and Lascaux.

Elsie's painting, and this is another characteristic of her honesty, doesn't resort to tricks such as aiding herself with photography in order to have it projected in the fabric afterwards. Her work is about re-creating, that is, she doesn't copy the motive literally, she causes it to undergo a transmutation of values where she removes, adds, reduces and juxtaposes shades, after all, there is a good amount of subjectivity, condition without which, it's not possible to achieve the poetic phenomenon. Nature is for her, object and subject at the same time. Her sensibility for color, the fineness of her textures is determined and it shows an elegance and a gentleness that culminates in great lyrical force.

Elsie's spirit is non-conformist and restless and it might be that this condition will lead her someday to decidedly change her current concept. It is premature to say, but if it would occur, it is important that this happen without her ceasing to be loyal to herself as she has been up to now. Elsie is young and still has a long way to go, therefore, a spectacular leap in the course of her artistic career cannot be discarded. Time will show if within Guatemala's landscape tradition, her work will remain as one of the most relevant and definitive. I hope and trust it will be so, in the meantime, my most sincere congratulations and one last recommendation: that she never let her zeal for Nature extinguish.

Roberto González Goiry

OUR LANDSCAPE AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF
ELSIE WUNDERLICH

The landscape or panorama, however you want to call it since after all in this era everything, or almost everything can be classified as "unisex", is a genre of fine arts that has been practiced for centuries by an endless number of artists, men and women. By means of drawing, engraving and particularly painting, they have transmitted from age to age, from country to country, from school to school, vernacular circumstances interpreted sometimes at indoor studios as a background for specific themes, or outdoors to experience the effects of light and color. It's sufficient to review the history of art beginning from the first Dutch and Flemish baroque painters up to the contemporary landscape artists, to verify the former, without forgetting the impressionists, pre and post, of course...

But this is not the intention of these lines. The case is that Elsie de Wunderlich, one of Guatemala's youngest landscape painters, such is the way I see her, after six years dedicated to her home, motherhood and all those minute and transcendent domestic affairs, (it is fitting to clarify since her first exhibition in the Escuela de Artes Plásticas) comes back until now to show her work as a whole. I remember some of her paintings from that time. Small, format of course, and a bit color-shy, but beautiful and joined by very subtle ties related to the actual ones...

And seizing again the thread, Elsie returns, it could almost be asserted, with a renewed pictorial and aesthetic vision, perhaps more mature, more passionate for her work and more liberated from influences and traditional themes like ruins, the streets of Antigua Guatemala and the everlasting Lake Atitlán, but I explain, I'm not looking down on them. Now she prefers simple themes. Not those that describe a place in an anecdotal manner. Masses of foliage. Places abounding in straw. Anonymous walls. Wild gardens. And panoramic views where you can guess the city amid the fog or the mountains that rest its tellurian in the distance…

In Guatemala there are some landscape artists that produce paintings in a nearly industrial way. But they paint with ansco-color, fuji-color or kodak-color. The point is to save time, trouble and work. Furthermore, you have to be up to date, with the age's mechanization. They will always find buyers. I hope that Elsie will not fall prey to those enchantments. Because to see Guatemala through her beautiful eyes now, is to begin to see pools of clear water that reflect the movement of the clouds over the depths of the sky, and the sparkle of color amongst the crowns of trees, the vivid bougainvillea flowers and the light grass that fully welcomes the sunlight. And it would be a shame that all this be lost. Right?

VASKESTLER
Guatemala, August 1989.

Elsie de Wunderlich's current landscapes could very well, in my opinion, become affiliated with the "Impressionism" although it doesn't keep an accurate coherence with the physical theories that drove this pictorial school. However, Elsie's relation with the color, more than with the form, and the studied treatment of its application, really bring her closer to these painters, who extracted their works from direct contact with Nature and the reaction provoked by one of the main elements that is the light.

And don't believe that, by trying to establish an approximation among Elsie's work and the integrants of this movement that mean so much to the future of Universal Art, I do it with the desire to tie her or to pigeonhole her into an aesthetic designation. On the contrary. I do it with the intention of acknowledging the validity of her artistic work, her dedication, her work and the positive development that she has reached.

It has been said that Nature in itself is not Art, because Art has its own Nature. But Nature favors conditions or circumstances that constitute a magnanimous source of inspiration. And Elsie de Wunderlich is living example of this, since in the daily encounters she goes in its search, not to copy it or imitate it, but to transmute it depending on the feeling that it arouses within her…

And it is with works as the ones she presents in this opportunity, that she manages to place herself in a deserving place within the heavily attended and heterogeneous group of landscape painters, that nowadays, realize their labor in our Guatemala.

Keep going, Elsie! the journey is waiting…

VÍCTOR VÁSQUEZ KESTLER

August, 1993.

An artist's look towards reality isn't just any look. The artist's senses and conscience capture from the environment those aspects that, to the common mortal, turn out to be invisible. The artist's way of looking lacks the simplification that practical life imprints on things, since, usually, we see what surrounds us aiming to satisfy certain needs, but we don't see. We see how useful reality can be for us. We grasp from the objects its practical dimension. It's logical, we have to develop, act, attain, live, reach.
The artist, looks in a different manner. He sees further. He perceives the "veils", the mystery, the harmony, the intimate life of reality. He knows how to see. He knows how to see because he loves what is seen. He perceives it as unique, rescues it in its radical individuality. He doesn't establish among things the links of the functional and the immediate . He looks at the bottom, without creating nets from useful relations. Without thinking of the benefits that things bring, he sees in them a deeper, purer and more essential meaning.
I see Elsie looking and I guess within her that wise look. It's as if she would struggle to rescue from reality the purest, as if she would scrutinize beyond appearances and penetrate into the essence. If, to her personal way of seeing, we add the know-how, given her long experience handling paint brushes and her pleasure for colors, we begin to understand her current proposal. After more than twenty-five years of work, we run across leaves, waters, roots, stems and woods translated with great strength, fruit of the labor of synthesis that has left behind the vibration of light and the swift brush stroke.
Now the stage has darkened, the forms can be outlined clearly and the light is less direct, seeming to emerge from a distant place. The perspective has been dislocated and brings to mind the Japanese proposal. There are abysses that astonish and aquatic levels that inundate. It is now a mysterious environment that doesn't give up its enigmas easily. On the contrary, enigma, magic and mystery float in the pictorial surface like leaves in water.
Elsie's incursion into sculpture has affected her painting. She has thickened the forms and strengthened the strokes. She now presents a volume that she didn't show before. This process reminds me of the complex simplification that Gaughin undertakes with figures. His elementalism was related with a search for the source, solid and direct. His paintings had the serenity of one who knows how to see. This painter is on the same path. Her colors are now less transparent and more flat. Her approaches to detail, by perceiving the large in the small, by restructuring the micro to reach very stylized macros denounce the sincerity of her search and denote a visual harmony that, as I said at the beginning, knows how to capture the essential through the apparent. The serenity that her current canvases instill isn't improvised.
The passing of time isn't in vain, nor, in this case, has it been vainly taken advantage of.
Wunderlich has been tracing her own journey and I see in her a penetrating maturity. Maturity that is the fruit of knowing how to see, of the labor and determination with which this painter has repeatedly taken up the landscape.

s. herrera u.
October 2003

HOME I BIOGRAPHY I EXHIBITIONS I CRITICS I CONTAC US

Copyright 2003 Designed by ArtealDia WebDesignDivision All rights reserved