MIRYAM ORTÍZ
Paraguay, 1973
Emotional and vibrant, the paintings
of Miryam Raquel Ortiz Timcke are both highly realistic
and subtly metaphoric. She paints figures in positions
suggesting vulnerability: her subjects are unclothed,
with their knees clasped to their chests. In this position,
the subject seems to long for an absent figure, denoted
by a pile of clothes or fallen rose petals. The colors
of the paintings are primarily blues and greens, but
they are shot through with startling accents of red,
as if echoing the memories of a psychological trauma.
OTimcke displays an innate ability to balance her composition
elegantly, while also portraying an intense emotional
drama within her figures. OTimcke has had a strong passion
for art all of her life, however has dedicated herself
full time for the past two years. She is an autodidacted
painter that has also studied drawing and oil painting
with master teachers in her home country of Paraguay
Agora Gallery
In painting as in literature,
the narrative thread that holds a story together has
become less linear in the postmodern era. Like some
of our best contemporary novelists, Otimcke, a painter
from Paraguay, finds new ways to narrate an inner reality
in her enigmatic figure paintings.
Acutely aware that we are living
in an age when the old stories of history, the bible,
and classical mythology no longer hold sway, Otimcke
creates subjective myths for a new age. Working in oil
and acrylic on canvas in a style as clear and pristine
in its formal components as that of Will Barnet or Alex
Katz, albeit with a more imaginative dimension, Otimcke
places her figures in settings that are neither landscapes
nor interiorsat least not in the sense that
we are used to thinking of either. Rather, they are
abstract environments beholden to the factual appearances
of neither. Nor are Otimcke's figures constrained by
clothing as they inhabit a realm where forms that are
not quite trees and not quite cruciforms, chromatically
sparkling with a patchwork spectrum of brilliant hues,
sometimes serve as a backdrop for their ideal nudity.
Such structures are especially
prominent in pictures such as "Alma Tuya...Alma
Mia" and "Plegarias" where they provide
compositional ballast and also appear strongly symbolic.
In the former painting, a female nude that crouches
under two such shapes in a position of supplication
over what appears to be a white cloth partially covering
a single rose. The prayerful feeling is supplemented
by an actual crucifix that dangles on its chain from
the larger structure. In the latter canvas, another
comely nude sits pensively in front of a single such
shape, as though meditating at the foot of a strangely
festive cross.
By contrast, another painting
called "Secretos" seems to dwell on a sense
of tension and distrust between two nudes in one of
Otimcke's fanciful invented landscapes. Although they
are seated in close proximity to each other they are
obviously poles apart, a scattering of
rose petals further emphasizing their estrangement.
Equally engaging in another manner,
Otimcke's "Nostalgia" centers on the seated
figure of a classically proportioned nude, seen in profile.
The setting is more suggestive of an interior, where
a graceful red ribbon, draped over a low bar, dangles
down and is absently fondled by the young woman, as
she supports her head on her bare knees, deep in a daydream
or
rapt romantic reverie. Like all of Otimcke's compositions,
"Nostalgia" provokes a wide range of intuitive
responses that are open to subjective interpretation,
involving the viewer in a process by which the painting
can serve as a mirror of one¹s own inner states.
Here, however, the symbolic conflicts that enliven some
of her other canvases are hushed and suspended, as we
are drawn into the serene solitude of the beautiful
dreamer.
