1999 at Lattuada Studio, Milan, Italy
by Robert C. Morgan
Angiola Churchill’s work has a playful aspect. Her paintings and collages allow the viewer to enter into the spirit of play by assembling abstractions of facial imagery. Whether they are given to a particular meaning or a dissemblance of meaning, it doesn’t really matter. What matters for Churchill is that the viewer learns to engage the subject matter with fresh eyes.
To see something with fresh eyes means that we see it for the first time. Nothing is repeated according to a particular style of tradition. Or if the style or tradition is present, the subjectivity of the viewer makes it new, makes it fresh and appealing, even titillating. Churchill sustains the power and creative inspiration. Through the use of paper and the color white, Churchill manipulates her simple surreal forms with subtle intensity. The repetition of eyes, as in The Eye Wall installation from 1988, gives the viewer a nealy hallucinogenic experience, an all-encompassing sense of being observed.
She is not a formalist because the content in her work goes beyond the forms themselves. Put anther way, Churchill invents new meanings for traditional abstract forms. Every nuance, every tone, every line – all of these elements have a function and a presence that leads us into the spirit of play, that expects something from us, a fresh glance, a new way of seeing, a new way of coming to grips with the reality of art.
By starting into the center, then moving out to the periphery of her marvelous collage, called World Wide View (1998), or by discovering the humor and intelligence in a work such as The Arrogant Trickster (1994), one is reminded of a child-like playfulness and with the liberation that is associated with this kind of creative energy.
Churchill has a remarkable breath in her work. It can go from the most subdued to the most exhilarating emotions. It can be intensely personal, yet at the same time project a social experience, of what we have seen before. There is a symbolic content in her work that is both secular and religious. Her forms are idiosyncratic. The eyes peer out at us with wonder, desire, and transcendence.
Churchill’s paintings represent an age-old tradition in western art, particularly the outsider art of the modernism era, the twentieth century. One may think of Odillon Redon or Louise Bourgrois. There is a Surrealist aspect to Churchill’s works on paper which is another way of saying that they are involved with the serious play of the mind.
Play requires a certain confidence and generosity, and ability to give without knowing if there will be anything given in return. This is the risk that every artist must take at the end of the century of modernism. In this sense, all modernist art is outsider art – until one believes that a reception for one’s work is possible.
There is no room for cynicism in the work of Angiola Churchill. These works on paper focus on the omniscient eye – on the all-knowing eye. They are telling us something about who we are as social beings. Works like the heroic Vanquished Eyes (1994) signify a dilemma that we all encounter, dilemma that we face to face with each day. These are images that make us aware that we are both seeing and being seen or, as the title of another of her works from 1998 suggests, we are in the process of both watching and being watched. This is a double dilemma, one that we face both in life and in art.
As the private world merges into public view, the symbolic connotation of the eye has a special meaning. It suggests that we are all social in our self-awareness, we are learning to cope with the realities of seeing that brings the whole world into focus. This is an important message, and a poetic one, that lingers far beyond the first encounter. This is a message that goes straight to the mind and equally to the heart.