Curatorial Statement
Are you able to notice when the darkness moves forth and light falls back? Do you walk through life just seeing faces? Do your walls and tables become an audience for the way you decorate time? Pareidolia is a phenomenon not unfamiliar to Olga Spiegel. The haunting ventures of the mind to put before us what is never obviously nor meant to be there. Spiegel has made sport of it and stretched it to palatial relations of a moment in time none of us truly witness, but all remember with conviction. Spiegel paints as if her foot is creating pedal notes, like Antonín Dvořák, to evoke the unexplored vastness of a new world, one she found in herself and in each one of us. One we can all clearly share the second our eyes meet the undeniable dance of maximalism and expansive psychedelic landscaping. This art drips with truth. The veracity of human will and prelude to manifestation.
The impressionists once wanted to capture a moment in time: the shimmer of light on water, the movement of trees in summer wind, the threshold of a daydream. Spiegel does not just flirt with the liminal, but dives into it. These moments, while ephemeral, feel reclined into infimums capturing something sacredly mortal despite the paintings’ celestial omnipresence. Each work gifted to the world by Olga Spiegel is a gift that endlessly gives as you will never finish peeling back each layer of vibrant animacy to the facades of monoliths that spatially invigorate each canvas. It makes all the sense in the world for Spiegel to be a wielder of the Old Masters’ technique.
I dare you to find the imprimatura to any one of her paintings, you will get lost in yourself before you do. Spiegel captures a daydream, but one that lives in us eternally. It is a vision of ourselves we decide to be brave enough to view. It feels dreamlike and fleeting because we laymen don’t stop to tempt the chance of falling down the rabbit hole. We by nature are disrupted and subverted by the phantasmic which lives on the margin. So, to us it will never be more than a hallucinogenic parlay that we stifle in insincerity. We are so uncomfortable by the opportunity to live in a world of neither here nor there. Yet to Olga, this is what electrifies her battery.
While Spiegel is no stranger to the use of grayscale, her landmark is vivid in acid tones. The moments captured in paint are dynamic and veil humanity as through the lens of a creator. The human body exists in a gradient with divine imagery. Whenever it is corporeal, it is always playful and prodigiously observant of the linseed universe around it or the viewer themselves. Spiegel’s mastership is text painted in her manipulation of naturalism and imagined naturalism. There is a poignant organicity in the embodiments of biotic reflections of mortal life. Sometimes it is in the form of water which flows amongst rigid architectural detail, other times it is the softness of our anatomy or reminiscent of molecular life. Biomimicry in the depth of spiritual stochasticity. Spiegel captures not just a wisdom we are only lucky to let ourselves see, but an idea of whimsical hope. It is a vision of the human seldom found, one that sees good in it.
These artworks cherish the complexity of the human soul and celebrate our endless interconnectedness. Spiegel invites the viewer to embrace a chaos they were destined for. There is a beautiful cyclicality of entropy. It unfolds the mystery of our subconscious, perhaps where all beginning is hidden. In a state where there is only metaphysical principle and law.
Everything is proximal and distant simultaneously, like the answers we search for always being in ourselves. These are echoes of a dream we can only imagine was had in our childhood. Embers of memory twinkle like déjà vu. You time travel. In the colorful cytoplasm of that which gives us life, there is no gravity.
There is familiarity in every feature because we’ve always known these things to be. There is profound beyond what we’re constrained to see. If you look long enough, everything will come forth—each layer reveals a hidden face.
Each life to ever live, each memory to make, is all encoded in plain paradoxical space. You choose a utopia if all you know is pareidolia.
Text by Gabriela Sartan, @gsartan