Intro

"CORNUCOPIA"     May 4th  2018,  Zeltner Schloss  Nuremberg, Germany

With her latest exhibition, Rosalind Porter opens a "horn of plenty" (lat. Cornucopia) in atmospherically dense paintings. A more or less visible horizon constantly divides her emotionally charged compositions into an above and below. In these interpretable ambivalent landscapes a melancholic state of limbo prevails.

Porter’s major theme is delimitation, even ambiguity. Indirect light seeps from diffuse clouds of colour and any illusions to trees are again to be read anthropomorphically. Although the onlooker cannot avoid recognizing landscapes, derived from the impulse of colour gestic, Porter's paintings fascinate in that their abstract quality is an autonomous pictorial fact.

Richly oscillating between Dionysian and Apollonian temperament, the painter plays virtuosically with the Sublime’s romantic legacy. Within this artificially created weather cauldron, the human being wanders around as a solitary staffage figure or its dematerialized body shell drifts beyond time and space.

Exposure of the deeper-lying preoccupies Porter all the more in her work on paper. Here, creating painting surfaces with layered mutilation can be understood as a metaphor for the artist’s general interest in making invisible existentiality tangible underneath a visible facade.

Text: Dr. Harald Tesan

Rosalind Porter's Art 

A short introduction by Dr. Joachim Stark, MA  History of Art

Since the Gothic art period and even more so since the Renaissance, landscapes have taken up a substantial part in painting, often enabling the viewer to identify with his own surroundings. Salvation and redemption were relevant in his own world and Jerusalem and The Holy Land were no longer the sole localities for religious miracles and promise.

In the 17th century landscape painting developed into a separate genre. The Dutch showed the change of the seasons and integrated people going about their daily life into their paintings. The French concentrated on heroic landscapes, where antique temple ruins or mythological scenes reminded of triumphant past epochs.

Landscapes, parks and gardens, where exuberant celebrations and erotic adventure took place were typical for 18th century painting. The English 19th century artists depicted landscape as a place of work, where the laborers’ huts stood in gloomy corners and the aristocracy and nobility was to be found in the lighter parts. It was invariably the case however that landscape painting had the aim of enticing the onlooker’s gaze to roam across vast spaciousness and deep into nature itself.

Rosalind Porter’s landscape painting however does not use any of this typical traditional characteristic. Her pictures seldom have a specific relationship to any existing scenery and even then, where a painting title may stipulate a real place, the actual picture represents a metaphor for something else, spiritual perception and disposition. Here, she is following in the tradition of Romantic painting. This may not be obvious at first sight as her paintings often appear strongly abstracted. However the intention  is  to display and to evoke emotion.

The compositions convey throughout, dark and sometimes claustrophobic moods.  Earthen colours, or masses of deep blue dominate the foreground, a midfield is seldom visible. Instead, a light spreading out over the horizon seems to show the path away from the shaded, heavy foreground areas which have yet to be crossed and overcome. Whether the often lonely and blurred figures in the foreground will succeed is not apparent.

Rosalind Porter’s landscapes and also her occasional excursions into the figurative genre with still-life and interiors, they all show us situations where people are restricted and controlled by overwhelming forces. They show the entanglement in earthly existence with all its bondage, its duress and futility. Signs of hope appear merely on a distant horizon.

Rosalind Porter’s psychic landscapes may derive from a subjective, individual attitude, nevertheless they portrait general aspects of the conditio humana in a world where the individual claims his rights of freedom and fortune. However one is at the same time subjected to mundane forces and to reification.

Dr.Joachim Stark, art historian MA