Page 5 - Julia Cseko the Rant series

Julia Csekö: Myths are Made for the Imagination i Joseph D. Ketner II
Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Emerson College, Boston
Julia Csekö has been making two bodies of artwork that are visually distinct, but conceptually interconnected, for over a decade since she experienced her moment of revelation in art school in Rio de Janeiro. On the one hand, she has painted excerpts from the texts of famous writers, editing phrases to share with her audience. On the other hand, she has knitted soft sculptures, fashioning mysterious forms that pierce through the mundane material life. Bene ciary of her rst solo exhibition in the United States as a recipient of the 2016 Walter Feldman Fellowship for Emerging Artists, she has created a new series of text paintings. This time, however, Csekö’s written her own texts. Here we witness the artist indulging in “the pleasure of thinking one’s own thoughts.with its own little plot.” ii
For the platform of her narrative, Csekö chose painting as the medium of her message. She reduced the format and colors of her canvases to triptychs painted in non-colors: three sets:
one black, one silver, and one gold. The delivery of her artistic
statement is direct, forcing the viewer to confront her words without the seduction of color. Yet her choice of format—the triptych—carries the inescapable metaphorical signi cance of the spiritual: the religious signi cance of the altarpiece, the sanctity of the holy trinity.
The things that we now call art have been a magical medium
of myth and metaphor since the Paleolithic Era, when art
appears simultaneously with religion, their futures inextricably
linked. Cultural anthropologists have theorized that art has
served homo spiritualis as a “projection onto the world.of a
strong mental image that colors reality before taking shape
and trans guring or recreating it.” To do so, the rst artists transcended the physical reality of existence through material
form to provide meaning to the chaos of existence.iii With the development of the painted, two-dimensional image, early
hominids (35,000 BP) made a signi cant cognitive leap into
abstract, visual thought, which is the foundation of articulating
shared metaphors and meaning. Csekö is acutely aware that 5