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Lot Essay
‘Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.’
—JORGE LUIS BORGES
A beguiling, vertiginous treatment of colour and line, Jardin suspendu (Suspended Garden) (1955) is a strong example of the visionary exploration of perspective undertaken by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. At the most abstract frontier of Vieira da Silva’s work, the piece uses the barest suggestions of form and shadow to conjure a feeling of weightlessness and depth, enveloping the viewer within its shifting sense of space; its patchwork of tranquil blues and greys is permeated by a soft white that floats through the canvas, while a lattice of fine perpendicular lines hints at spatial definition only to dissolve into the work’s sea of colour, leaving us tantalisingly uncertain of our plane of vision – whether we are looking into or over the ‘garden’ before us.
Painted in 1955 in Vieira da Silva’s adopted home of Paris, the work is reflective of a new sense of openness in the artist’s approach. While her early pieces repeatedly portrayed an enclosed box structure, rendered in grids of kaleidoscopic tiles which she twisted and warped in her experiments with perspective, the 1950s saw her begin to open her canvas out in the search for new perspectival possibilities. Jardin suspendu dates from a period in which the artist produced a number of works based on the urban environment, using the landscape of the city to begin experimenting with perspective more radically than ever before, multiplying and moving her vanishing points around the canvas and stretching her subjects into abstraction. The painting takes up the theme of her 1952 La ville suspendue (The Suspended City) – only where that earlier work produced its fluctuating perspective through the careful manipulation of clearly lined panels of discrete colour, here Vieira da Silva works to achieve a sense of suspension and blissfully dizzying depth through careful blending of tones and judiciously placed darker hues, conjuring a precious, pastoral atmosphere that flickers and shimmers in the frame.
Captivated early in her career by Cézanne’s re-imagination of space within the frame of the painting, the nature of perspective and the means by which space was represented remained the central questions she returned to throughout her career. She once recounted that ‘Wols said to me: “I like what you do very much; but tell me, why do you always paint perspective?” I replied that it was something that wasn’t done in modern art, but that despite everything I felt that I had to do’ (M. H. Vieira da Silva, quoted in C. Roy, Vieira da Silva 1908-1992, Barcelona, 1998, p. 22). If her contemporaries in Paris, like Wols or Georges Mathieu, were developing a wildly gestural style of abstraction as a means of communicating selfhood, Vieira da Silva’s painstaking studies of destabilised, shifting perspectives reflected her own sense of self, unanchored in a modern world without a gravitational centre of meaning. In Jardin suspendu, we too are offered this navigational challenge of deciding where we stand: as the artist once said ‘I do not want people to remain passive. I want them to come and take part in the game, go for a walk, climb up, go down’ (M. H. Vieira da Silva, quoted in G. Rosenthal, Vieira da Silva 1908-1992: The Quest for Unknown Space, Cologne, 1998, p. 71).
—JORGE LUIS BORGES
A beguiling, vertiginous treatment of colour and line, Jardin suspendu (Suspended Garden) (1955) is a strong example of the visionary exploration of perspective undertaken by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. At the most abstract frontier of Vieira da Silva’s work, the piece uses the barest suggestions of form and shadow to conjure a feeling of weightlessness and depth, enveloping the viewer within its shifting sense of space; its patchwork of tranquil blues and greys is permeated by a soft white that floats through the canvas, while a lattice of fine perpendicular lines hints at spatial definition only to dissolve into the work’s sea of colour, leaving us tantalisingly uncertain of our plane of vision – whether we are looking into or over the ‘garden’ before us.
Painted in 1955 in Vieira da Silva’s adopted home of Paris, the work is reflective of a new sense of openness in the artist’s approach. While her early pieces repeatedly portrayed an enclosed box structure, rendered in grids of kaleidoscopic tiles which she twisted and warped in her experiments with perspective, the 1950s saw her begin to open her canvas out in the search for new perspectival possibilities. Jardin suspendu dates from a period in which the artist produced a number of works based on the urban environment, using the landscape of the city to begin experimenting with perspective more radically than ever before, multiplying and moving her vanishing points around the canvas and stretching her subjects into abstraction. The painting takes up the theme of her 1952 La ville suspendue (The Suspended City) – only where that earlier work produced its fluctuating perspective through the careful manipulation of clearly lined panels of discrete colour, here Vieira da Silva works to achieve a sense of suspension and blissfully dizzying depth through careful blending of tones and judiciously placed darker hues, conjuring a precious, pastoral atmosphere that flickers and shimmers in the frame.
Captivated early in her career by Cézanne’s re-imagination of space within the frame of the painting, the nature of perspective and the means by which space was represented remained the central questions she returned to throughout her career. She once recounted that ‘Wols said to me: “I like what you do very much; but tell me, why do you always paint perspective?” I replied that it was something that wasn’t done in modern art, but that despite everything I felt that I had to do’ (M. H. Vieira da Silva, quoted in C. Roy, Vieira da Silva 1908-1992, Barcelona, 1998, p. 22). If her contemporaries in Paris, like Wols or Georges Mathieu, were developing a wildly gestural style of abstraction as a means of communicating selfhood, Vieira da Silva’s painstaking studies of destabilised, shifting perspectives reflected her own sense of self, unanchored in a modern world without a gravitational centre of meaning. In Jardin suspendu, we too are offered this navigational challenge of deciding where we stand: as the artist once said ‘I do not want people to remain passive. I want them to come and take part in the game, go for a walk, climb up, go down’ (M. H. Vieira da Silva, quoted in G. Rosenthal, Vieira da Silva 1908-1992: The Quest for Unknown Space, Cologne, 1998, p. 71).