The Block of terror
Some glances at the paintings of Natalia Zourabova and Hayao Miyazaki.
Sarit Shapira, 2010
A man is seated in the driving seat of a car, and his wife is beside him. Their daughter is seated in the back. They are surrounded by a desert landscape, a stone border and silence. Even the desert plants and the few soldier figures at the border appear to be silent and still. The faces of the man and his wife are directed towards that which is ahead of them. Their daughter on the other hand, is turning her face backwards.
The girl (like in Sandro Botticelli's paintings for example,) is the figure that mediates between the domain of the painting and that of the viewer. The parent figures on the other hand, turn their backs to the viewer. They lean their faces forwards in a matter-of fact and predictable manner towards the direct continuation of the road they had been driving through. The girl, the mediating figure or the viewer’s ‘medium’, turns her body on its axis and tilts it backwards to indicate the journey that has been made in relation to the journey that has not been made yet. The border checkpoint and the roadblock are situated between the route that had been passed and the one ahead. The same figure of the girl also functions as the “keeper of the threshold” - A character that is meant to arouse our awareness of the borderline, the barrier and the point at which the two roads split and become different from one another.
The positioning of the girl’s posture demonstrates and emphasizes a moment of delayed movement in the course of the world, and it also directs our gaze towards the surroundings of the border checkpoint, between the designated “green belt” and the “occupied territories”. They are not meant to be viewed as the stronghold of a land which holds the state's institutionalized mechanisms, but rather, as a site which harbors effervescent de-territorializing activities, which quietly and secretly direct us towards the ex-territory. The exposed face of the girl, the face of the “medium”, is the face of clarity and the power of acknowledgement, awareness and sensitivity. The turning of the back, which is performed by the adult characters, is presented as a point of weakness that is related to blindness and ignorance. To large degree, strength and weakness are measured and noted here through the character’s ability or inability to recognize the place and moment of a threshold in which a straight path deviates from its course. Notions of balance are undermined, the ways of the world are turned upside down and everything is in doubt.
The imagery in Zourabova’s painting “ Blockpost”, and its interaction with the space resembles one of the opening scenes in “Spirited Away” (2003) by the Japanese animation film director Hayao Miyazaki, whom Zourabova often mentions her fondness toward. This animation film also includes a depiction of parents seated in the front seats of a car whilst their daughter is in the back seat. The family makes its way from its former home to a new one. They drive along the countryside, and suddenly stumble upon an unfamiliar path that has ancient and peculiar sculptures positioned on each end of its entrance. As their faces lean forward, the parents become very decisive about making a diversion from the way they had driven through so far. They enter a side path. Their daughter on the other hand, distorts her face and screams with terror as they cross a boundary towards a path that deviates from their route. As far as the parents are concerned, the unknown site that they have just entered isn’t essentially different from the uninhabited and ‘natural’ area they had just passed through. They expect adventures, entertainment and the pleasurable amazement of a leisurely hour from this unfamiliar place. However, as far as the girl is concerned, the entrance to the unknown territory represents “the crossing of a threshold”, a terrifying passage from one world to another in which the latter inverts the rules, places and paces of the former one. As the movie progresses it becomes apparent that this unfamiliar place is a site were everything is turned on its head, a place which conjures up and invokes mythical creatures, imaginary beings, magicians, spells, alchemical creations, ancient laws of trade and punishment, godforsaken symbols and other events in which dreams, wonders and terrors coexist in a single hunched position.
The picture that portrays Miyazaki’s world is crammed with portrayals of characters and events in the life of this “twilight zone”. In contrast, Zourabova’s painting does not describe the narratives that unfold within this mysterious world, but rather, it hints at their potential: In some of the gazes of its figures as before mentioned, in the strange, non-realistic, almost surrealist and symbolic colorfulness of its parts (otherwise, why, for example, did the hairs of the father figure in “Blockpost” become blue?). Yet the comparative approach to observing these scenes of arrival in a territory which is occupied by strangers (for Miyazaki in the form of ghosts and spirits and for Zourabova, in the form of Israel’s occupying forces) enables us to view a world in which Natalia Zourabova’s characters and paintings function slightly differently: not merely as a political arena, but mainly as a mental site, were incidents of terror, wildness, evil and redemption engage with something deeper, more ancient, or alternatively more futuristic than their immediate context.
Miyazaki’s world contains folds of several different layers and dimensions: of life and death, reality and fantasy, childhood and adulthood (and old age), magic tricks and modern technology, acts of sorcery and ‘the natural order’ of the universe. Many of the dramatic occurrences in his films take place and settle within borderline areas that lay between these different domains. In “Howl’s moving castle”(2001), for example, the events that take place around the castle' s doors have a special meaning. (The castle in this film functions as the site of wonders that moves in parallel with the modernized city that repeatedly responds to technological innovations like the metropolis in the early stages of modernism). In "Ponyo"(2008), the characters and the central dramas take place on the border between the inhabited area and the sea, the place of animistic forces, nature’s omnipotent (feminine) entities, frenzied ships, ghost magicians from the past and other characters which belong to the realms of death, the unconscious and the unknown.
All of these are incarnated in sea imagery (according to Jung and Bachelard).
This very image of the sea shore, this border-line between land and the domain of the sea that is stormier and less stable, becomes a central theme in “High tide and low Tide”(2010), one of the pieces recently created by Natalia Zourabova, who’s surface resembles a multi-piece jigsaw . The graphic style of the entire composition, the hard and sharpened, almost spiky edges of its images, tie it to the graphics of Japanese Manga and its form of interpretation of romantic subject matters such as marine landscapes. The romantic, dark and morbid aspect of romanticism (An aspect which no doubt has a place and a part in Miyazaki’s animation pieces) is revealed by Zourabova in the pieces of the painterly jigsaw puzzle that depict darkening skies that signal the beginning of a storm at sea. It is also present in another part which unveils the horrors of the very moment of a storm, as airplanes spin in the wind and one of them collides and sinks into deep water. A dark wake follows another triptych from the puzzle-like pieces. In some of its different areas one can see a car that randomly stops at the shore of a dark nocturnal sea, her doors are ajar and than, all that is left in the picture are the traces of her tires. With regards to Miyazaki’s "Ponyo", Zourabova’s painting brings to mind the nocturnal driving scene were the young mother of the boy drives along a steep cliff by the sea as a storm takes place.
The dramatic narrative of the painting appears to become moderate when interior scenes are presented in Zourabova’s painting. Such interior spaces are articulated through a view of a wall in the background, which appears to block off the room, infusing it with a confined, almost claustrophobic atmosphere. Yet in this ‘block’ within the house’s space, there is also a mark of an opening which indicates a ‘border-line’ that directs the gaze towards a segment from another space: ‘Exterior’, but not only as an interpretation of a fragment of the ‘natural’ world, but as an appearance of a nocturnal and hidden world which sprouts out and unveils itself, comprised of images and shapes that are derived from popular fantastical graphics (Manga, for example) as well as from references of Modernist Symbolic art, such as works by Paul Gauguin or Henri Matisse.
Similar to many of the works of these masters, the ornamental and sometimes oriental patterning in Zourabova’s pieces covers all the areas of the painting, specifically the curtains on the windowsills. Such is the case in “Movie1” (2010). This time the ornamented curtain flirts in the wind as if an invisible ‘something’ or ‘someone’ is blowing it from outside. As the ‘uncanny’ (Freudian) figure appears to knock on the entrances of the house, suddenly the windows of the darkened houses which appear through the slits between the window sill and the curtain, or the blue color lighting the vacant computer screen in the room appear as the first signs of a horrific event which rises and approaches during the dark. The interiors painted by Zourabova exist in the night hours. Her figures are also preoccupied with habitual and expected nighttime activities such as watching television. But when they do so, like in “Movie 2” (2010), these figures also look like they are directing their attention towards the window that mediates between themselves and the darkened night that is embedded in the twinkles of the stars - Both threatening and miraculous.
The bodily postures of these household members may appear as a representation of the action of leaning the head on the hands in order to watch the television more comfortably. But the direction in which these figures are presented from behind, with their hands slightly shifting forward can also appear as if they were hiding their faces in a moment of terror or astonishment, at the sight of a nocturnal vision. The outburst of the ‘revelation’ into a trivial and mundane scene is also implied in “Barbara 2 “(2010): In the foreground of the space of a room, a young woman is hunched forward, perhaps in a surrendered pose, maybe consumed in a meditative state. She turns toward a glass table, which for an instance, seems like a small pool, as peculiar reflections spring up and rise from it.
Much like the inhabitants of the house, the furniture and other objects project a realistic logic, however, they also bare imprints of signs of moments of revelation. These signs and wonders involve the slight changes that occur in the objects, the symbolic coloration that coats them, the artificial lighting which is cold, almost terminal or even apocalyptic. All of these elements in Zourabova’s scene, insinuate signs of occurrences that have not happened yet, events which precede the grand, spectacular and more dramatic incident.
These slight fractures in the normative order of the household take place slowly, delaying the arrival of the terrible that is to follow: A prolonged procedure which is exerted from the frozen appearance of the objects and characters. The procedure is reflected through the painterly medium, applied manually, slowly and carefully, in a similar manner to the way in which the medium of animation, i.e. 'painting in motion' enables Miyazaki’s characters and narratives to slowly conduct ‘journeys of initiation’. In other words, these 'rites of passage' are produced and realized through a 'low-tech' technology, who’s 'frame-by-frame', step-by- step mode of production evokes the memory of an early and crucial chapter in the history of modernism: the moment in which terror and amazement were activated vis-à-vis the exposure to new technology in conjunction with ancient practices of magic and spells.
In a similar way to notable Romantic works (such as “The Tin Drum” by Gunter Grass, or Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander”), Miyazaki’s films contain child characters which portray the role of the ‘medium’, guiding the journey (to and fro, like a shamanic voyage or other processes of initiation) into wondrous worlds. Natalia Zourabova’s paintings also frequently present child characters (hinted upon in the painting through a child-like toy such as a jigsaw puzzle). Their representations are quite different from those of the adults, since the child figures are stretched, agile, receptive and more intense. In a similar manner to many of Miyazaki’s movies, Zourabova’s narratives are frequently woven out of members of a nuclear family (parents, or a single parent and a child): And all that is ‘uncanny, hence, ‘threatening’, is caught up and trapped within incidents which occur at home. This applies to both Miyazaki and Zourabova.
The adoption of the harsh contours and the mechanical stylization that characterizes the graphics of the Japanese animator assists Natalia Zourabova in the reinforcement of the account of terror and ‘passive / aggressive’ that lurks in her paintings. This is followed by the alienation and coldness that dominate her characters. Even though the spaces in the paintings seem to be filled with images and decorative forms, there is a profound sense of emptiness, restlessness and discomfort which pervades over the world of characters that are staged to appear frozen and dreamy. When she paints them on a Jigsaw like surface that is easily assembled and taken apart, she actually reinforces the vulnerable and ephemeral state of her figures. Besides the romantic voices attached to the painting, one can simultaneously hear disturbing voices that accompany the absurd, imbedded in the summoning of an escapist state of mind which repeatedly dreams and evokes the phantom-like journey towards childhood and past worlds. But nevertheless, this absurd act will be enacted again and again as art's raison d'etre. Without this act, art does not exist, and without art this absurd act is worthless: It could have been a long lost dream which has expired, but art itself, is the one thing that can resuscitate its relevance and legitimacy as something which is not directed and dependent on political circumstances, historical contexts or critical examinations.