THROUGH THE OPACITY OF MEMORY
J H-Botquelen, oscillates between reflexive opacity and transitive transparency, an unreasoning narrative space where materials and mediums communicate in aesthetic coherence and unexpected alterity.
Veronica CUOMO
PRIMEVAL I
Looking, but not being able to see through as a dominant feature. One imbuing oppressive timelessness onto the most fragile features of those works. Conveying the fraction of a second, when facing a maelstrom of primal emotions, before their awareness is taking place.
This series started when our world was shutting shut down because of a virus name Covid. Eyes became an obsession and woke in me, childhood ‘s forgotten memories. It is a dialogue between figurative work on paper on canvas and abstract creation, sculptures in glass paste on paper, fused in sand, 2 different techniques for the same theme. The moment before, frozen and ephemeral, the human emotion contained or the creation of a galaxy
2019-2021
These verse that were written by my friend the artist James Allen expresses perfectly the profound meaning of this series:
Where mingles the foment of ideas,
James ALLEN
The ferment of forces breaking symmetry?
Where swirls the eddies of all times possible,
The meaning of all things that may have been
Or are, or may yet be?
Here.
Here.
Frozen in an ever-changing timeless moment.
Captured in a vortex, a froth of the tantalizing unknown
A mysterious universe seeking to know
Consciousness seeking to know a mysterious universe.
The series is composed of paintings, “I COULD FEEL MY HEART BEATING” I-VI, glass sculptures, AEON I, AEON II, VORTEX, and canvas with glass powders AEON III, AEON IV, VORTEX II”
I COULD FEEL MY HEART BEATING I
Self-made paper on canvas, watercolor
In I can feel my heartbeating I-V… executed with a dark watercolors palette on self-made paper on canvas, the artist stage ageless faces falling silent into their stories, trapped in the dense space they inhabit. Dark-eyed, the characters are engulfed in a secluded world. They are distant, and the paper’s veiled effect accentuates their inaccessibility.
Extract from the curator Veronica CUOMO’s art-essay on Jacqueline H-BOTQUELEN
I COULD FEEL MY HEART BEATING II
I COULD FEEL MY HEART BEATING III
The lost innocence of these once little girls is oppressive. Dead birds camouflaged into the composition remind the spectator of the precarity of human existence. The occupation of the pictorial space carries along in its somber atmosphere an instant of latency before the devastation.
Veronica CUOMO
I COULD FEEL MY HEART BEATING IV
The imagery it refers to is comprised of enigmas and shadows. Botquelen reclaims the right to her phantoms with overwhelming intensity, capturing in the bi- dimensionality of the painting a moment of infinity.
Veronica CUOMO
I COULD FEEL MY HEART BEATING V
Like the French philosopher and art critic, Louis Marin proposed in 1989, the storia occurs in modern representation, from the articulation between reflexive opacity and transitive transparency. JHB oscillates effortlessly between them with graceful proficiency.
Veronica CUOMO
I COULD FEEL MY HEART BEATING VI
In a pilgrimage through the opacity of memory, these mysterious fragments of consciousness become metaphors of the path Botquelen follows; it is a search for the ultimate essence of her art, materialized in the sophisticated manipulation of millenarian materials in an attempt to resist fading into oblivion.
Veronica CUOMO
AEON I
Glass on paper, fuse in sand.
Mastering figurative and abstract representations, in this series, JHB features nonfigurative sculptures built with a revisited procedure of granulated glass, self-made paper, and sand to explore different textures, resulting in a sensory delight for the viewer.
Veronica CUOMO
AEON II
Seeing through…
These circles allow us to “see through” the Big Bang into the aeon that would have existed beforehand. The circles, they say, are the marks left in our aeon by the spherical ripples of gravitational waves that were generated when black holes collided in the previous aeon. And they say that these circles pose a problem for inflationary theory because this theory says that the distribution of temperature variations across the sky should be Gaussian, or random, rather than having discernable structures within it.
According to Penrose and Gurzadyan
VORTEX I
The concept of vortex spans different scales, from microscopic to cosmic, reflecting the fundamental principles of rotational motion in various systems. Introverted emotional state analogy between man and universe.
AEON III – AEON IV
GLASS ON PAPER ON CANVAS – Self made paper, glass powders.
VORTEX II
PRIMEVAL II
THROUGH THE BOUNDARY OF NO ESCAPE
“RESISTING GRAVITY” series 2022-2023
-Paintings (watercolor on paper on canvas)
Expressing an iconography related to violence, scratching the inner space of beauty, youth and innocence.
With the Primeval Series II, “Through the Boundary of No Escape” “Resisting Gravity”, the strong colors invite a discourse about what lies beyond or below the surface of any individual…how are we handling the unspeakable, piercing the dark matter, fighting to go through the “Event Horizon” and overcome emotional numbness, to be alive again…
Resisting Gravity – 1992
For Charles Baudelaire, the work of the poet is to transcend Evil to find “Beauty”, as he wrote in his book “The Flower of evil”, “Les fleurs du mal”, thinking that we can only achieve it, through the state of mind called spleen, which is death and destruction.
Melancholy is the illustrious companion of beauty; it is so good that I cannot conceive of any beauty that does not carry within itself its sadness
Charles Baudelaire
JHB take us in an inner world where our primal being is made for survival, opening oneself to the state of resilience, sowing hope and beauty in its path.
THROUGH THE BOUNDARY OF NO ESCAPE
JHB
Fugitive of the Event Horizon
I am the black hole.
RESISTING GRAVITY I
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER ON CANVAS
RESISTING GRAVITY II
WATERCOLOR ON PAPER ON CANVAS
- Work in progress …. coming soon !
“My name is Ulysses”
“RESISTING GRAVITY” III, IV, V
(from watercolor to digital metamorphose)
This line of works in “Resisting Gravity III-IV-V”, came into being while thinking on how human expressions and their technical evolutions has been very inter-dependent. From the beginning of time humankind uses progress and newly won insights to create objects and images of art for communication and storytelling.
In an exhilarated loop inside digital and classical worlds, using mainly photography, collage, watercolor, i decided to upload them into the “digital world” to a digital cloud. Hence digitalized, applied several more layers in creation by reworking them through the lenses of Digital Creation tools.
Evolving the original works born from classical organic matter to a digitalized reworked image mounted on an upbeat top of the art aluminum bond.
RESISTING GRAVITY III
watercolor
RESISTING GRAVITY IV
watercolor
“Adding to the innate sense in my art, which is the original and ancient way of expression, a newly fused layer of creation with future born technologies. Re-birthing them on the “classical” display of a wall presentation. “
J H-Botquelen
RESISTING GRAVITY V
watercolor
RESISTING GRAVITY VI, VII
Digital artworks-2023
