IT was through the search of the complex and unknown that Spanish-Chilean artist Cristina Grisar found her footing in various art disciplines. Dressed in a monochromatic black ensemble, she stood as a stark contrast against the vibrant galactic abstracts and metallic sculptures that recently adorned The Crucible Gallery, which hosted her exhibit Hyperbolic Nature.
“This exhibition is an ode to nature, where the imaginary showcased in each artwork and medium is a reflection of an insatiable curiosity for discovering other words, parallel realities, and a metaphor of my own internal geography—glimpses of my ‘antipodes,’ as visionary writer Aldous Huxley would put it,” Grisar says in the exhibition notes.
The collection is the second solo exhibit in the country of Grisar, who is the granddaughter of Presidential Merit for Art and Culture awardee Betsy Westendorp. The first one, The Bejewelled Cosmos, was held at ArtistSpace of the Ayala Museum in Makati City in February last year.
Rather than carrying a thoroughly different identity, the exhibit proved to be an evolution of its predecessor. “As an artist, your themes are a part of yourself—it’s an evolution, a continuation.” said Grisar at The Crucible Gallery during the show’s opening in late-November. On view in the said showroom were her acrylic and mixed media paintings, aluminum and steel sculptures, photographs and jewelry of biomorphic inspiration.
Looking at the multiformat show before her, Grisar said: “There are some of my works that are forthcoming nature-wise, extroverted from the natural world, organic.” It was also from this philosophy of dissociating from reality that came the “attempt of transmitting unspoken things, emotions, feelings, the sensory, [giving] form to matter to transcend and vivify it.”
Biomorphism is defined as forcing naturally occurring shapes and patterns reminiscent of nature and living organisms onto functional devices. Biomorphic art exhibits the appearance of a living thing through the use of “organic shapes with shapeless and vaguely spherical hints of the forms of biology.” Renowned artists, such as Joan Miro and Barbara Hepworth both epitomized their works in this form.
In retrospect, Grisar wrote that French philosopher Henri Bergson argued that “creativity evolves in the same way as nature does,” and that “randomness is essential both in the natural world and the creative works of artists.” Thus, automatism was central in Bergson’s philosophy.
Biomorphism has greatly influenced surrealism or the study of the subconscious. “Consequently, surrealism was the ultimate manifestation of this biologicalization of forms as it relied on true automatism—the perfect expression of freedom and unforeseeable novelty, also dwelling in the oniric domain,” Grisar wrote.
She concluded that the development of such lifeformic art has aided in the marriage between an individual’s inborn rational and analytical side to the “spontaneous and irrational” biomorphic world.
“In this line, the realm of abstraction is an invaluable tool for sailing the unknown, for it is a means of expression freed from boundaries: It is, at the same time, a language, a personal tongue; it is inventing new ways of communications; it is a journey, never quite knowing what you’ll encounter. It challenges our perceptions, being a fantastically unconscious process, so rewarding when the language starts acquiring not only a visual but overall sensory and intimate coherence,” Grisar wrote.
With regards to the thought process of creating her art pieces, Grisar shared that she’s having constant dialogues between forms and themes. For this particular exhibit, what she wanted to highlight were her sculptures and jewelries, which she began developing with Cosmos. “It’s the beginning of a new facet in my jewelry and jewelry-making, which per se are very sculptural, so it was only a matter of time for magnifying and translating them into proper sculptures. It also goes along with the inspiration that I always have, which is nature,” Grisar said.
Having been born in a family of artistic lineage, the context of developing her own voice as an artist ultimately worked its way during the interview. When asked if she tries to live up to the family name and her grandmother’s legacy, Grisar said: “Not really, we are very different persons. Me as an artist, I don’t look to anybody, I get my inspiration from everywhere.”
She added, “Basically the imagery that is displayed in my work, I don’t think it has a lot to do with my lola’s. I am much more baroque and I am more on earthy materials. On the other hand, she is more ethereal.”
Still, the 34-year-old Madrid painter and jeweler is grateful of this birthright, as it has given her the realization of her calling as an artist, and how she used this to hone her personal artistic language through her jewelries.