Nina Surel

Combining different techniques which include photography, painting and incorporation of objects, Surel endows with visual exuberance a proposal that revisits quite openly scenes and poses from the classics of romantic iconography or of the gallant painting. A mimetic maneuver that eventually approximates her work to the rococo stereotypes of Fragonard or Watteau, or to the mystic of the forest recreated in their time by Seurat and Van Gogh.

The deep forest, in Surel’s case, not only serves as background to the representation of the subject but it reaffirms itself as an allegory of the inscrutable and ancestral component of the usual social inclination toward myth.

Nature in her images is the perfect framework to enhance the introspective intentionality crouching behind the neutral expressions of the human face. In an unprejudiced act of intentional narcissism, the impassive quality of the repeated faces of Surel herself achieves the indispensable estrangement for the aspiration of becoming the center of reflection to be a part of the debate before the work. In the meantime, the ornamental multi-colored quality, occasionally bordering on kitsch, complements the figure in an affected way, suspiciously situating the result between beauty and irony.

If the surface of the pieces is carefully observed, the intricate work in the assemblage of diverse elements proceeding from the dual everyday quality of the woman-artist is discovered. Even when ornamentation overflows bi-dimensionality, the sublimation of attention to detail seeks to integrate in the spatial conception of pictorial tradition.

Painting, photography, lace, buttons, handicraft, imitation jewelry, porcelain, are brought together with resin on the wood, weaving an imaginary where THE nineteenth century allusion and THE bucolic, contrast with the conceptual revision of the stylistic appropriations. A counterpoint which in works like Nectar (2011), as an evident example, is not devoid of a certain satirical-reflexive tone, although not resulting in parody.

In the midst of formal intersections, Surel’s discourse becomes ambiguous, unrestricted. Inter textualities widen and through the incorporated motifs the bridges of reference to the romantic novel, the fairy tales or to magic realism, where the feminine nature has been stereotyped, become inevitable. In Understory, the aesthetic exercise reveals itself as the bearer of a feminism that resorts to visual exaltation, taking distance from the conventional statements. Feminism flows delicate and intrinsic, accompanied by intellectual suspicions and by a subliminal sarcasm which from the sweet oneiric appearance seems to ridicule the historic obsession for diminishing women from their gender condition. In her desire to idealize form, the exquisite manual quality also covers a non-conformist criterion. It is as if the metaphoric claim would fantasize incisively around a current social knot.