Christine Sefolosha
By Roger Manley

"Accidents, try to change them— it’s impossible. The accidental reveals man."
Picasso

"We try not to have ideas, preferring accidents. To create, you must empty yourself of every artistic thought."
Gilbert, of Gilbert and George

"There is the old brute, too, the savage, the hairy man who dabbles his fingers in ropes of entrails . . . whose speech is guttural, visceral— well, he is here. He squats in me."
Virginia Woolf

Years ago, sitting in a darkened room on the first day of an Introduction to Modern Art survey course, I strained to see my spiral binder well enough to take rapt notes while my art history professor set out to explain the mysteries of painting. "Cézanne," he announced, flashing the first slide, "saw the canvas as a field of action. After the first stroke of the brush, each subsequent stroke related to it, and in turn to all the other accumulated strokes in-between, until the work was complete." I dutifully wrote this down word-for-word, for it sounded like one of those simple observations that introduce a complexity, like Newton watching apples fall and writing Bodies attract, or Ben Franklin declaring that lightning is electricity. Weeks would pass before it finally dawned on me that this was as far as this professor could take us, and that each new artist we encountered would be introduced with a variation on the same theme, reworded to disguise the similarity of his explications: "For Pollock, knowing when to quit was most critical, for every action built upon all previous actions . . . " and so on. This formulation (in a host of guises), and another which rang changes on the idea ". . . that modern artists realized the canvas is, after all, essentially a flat surface with paint on it," were the only two bits of insight to be provided in the course. Unfortunately they were also largely wrong, but that took a much longer time and many encounters with real working artists to realize.

Luckily at least we saw hundreds of slides, and the works could speak for themselves. Projected big on the wall, I could see how the cigarette butts Pollock had (accidentally?) dropped and embedded in his works really did "relate" to the skeins of paint dripped from his stirring sticks, not only because they were in the same field of view on the same flat surface, but because--like most other successful artists--he knew how to welcome the benign intervention of accident, when prompted by intentional experimentation. I could see why Duchamp declared his "Large Glass" finally complete after some workmen had cracked it, or (as revealed in x-rays) how other, earlier artists had experimented with hand positions and placement of shrubbery until their compositions at last clicked into place. That such pieces were experiments suggested that the artists weren't at all certain of the results beforehand, and had to feel their way forward to completion, making mistakes along the way.

Far from being a matter of control--of carefully relating stroke to stroke by sheer original intent as we were told--art is far more often alive when it is a dance between chance and control, suggestion and vision. Those who leave the least room for error are, at best, fine craftsmen (and at worst hacks) but real inspiration springs largely from doubt and confusion. The origins of the word itself hint at this: evocatively possessed, the ancient oracles sat in their tripods over their sulphurous subterranean vents breathing (i.e., inspiring) fumes and generating non-sense which their managers--the real artists--translated into revelation. Augurs found insight in nervous flights of birds, random heaps of entrails or scorched bones from farm animals. To seek inspiration, in other words, is to trust chance, to welcome the random, and, proceeding in spite of doubt, to see opportunity and intent in the accidental. The muse is most likely to withhold her generous company at the very moment too much control is exerted.

Christine Sefolosha is an artist skilled at her own games of chance. Working mostly on the floor, with raw pigments and watercolors and often with such atypical artistic materials as tar and earth, she turns chance as much to her own advantage as any casino. Beginning from initial movements as seemingly random as the pointer on a Ouija Board (and yet also just as controlled), she spreads and pushes her substances to generate forms and shapes which can then be refined just enough--adding, perhaps, a pair of fierce eyes, or a more defined edge--to bring out of hiding the beings which animate their surfaces--surfaces which are so much more than merely flat with paint on them.

This isn't an easy act, and she is careful not to overdo it; look twice and her figures can recede back to their origins, the way passing clouds may only briefly look like a boat or a bird or the face of Jesus. Just as fish leaping from a pond can seem to animate the water they live in, it's this constant appearing and re-disappearing of her figures which give the paintings life. They fluctuate between the intentional images they are and the stains and smears they were before, alive to the degree they straddle the line between the here and not-quite-here. And balance between presence and absence is, after all, one way to describe Spirit.

Relying for creative inspiration on that which is given by (or found in) chance is as old as art. The painters of Lascaux and Altamira took advantage of cracks and irregularities in the walls of their caves to determine the placement of the mingled herds they drew. Sumi ink-brush artists often began by making "thoughtless" stains on their silk scrolls before developing them into mystical landscapes or flowering apricot branches, hundreds of years before Dadaists would write music and poetry based on notes and words determined by chance. Leonardo says he sought ideas in damp-stained walls, while flaws or veins of discoloration in their blocks of marble could lead a Michelangelo or Bernini to discover new, more dynamic poses for their sculpted figures. Always, the real masters weren't those who placed everything under total control, but the ones who had learned to bend chance to their purpose--or to accommodate it if they couldn't. Their greatest gifts are were best revealed in their ability repeatedly to make "happy accidents" repeatedly.

Sefolosha's mastery is best demonstrated by the fact that her paintings are recognizably her own. Under her care and guidance, theriocephalous shamans and familiars appear from the initial chaos and begin to crowd them; a Zen master starting from the same "random" stains as she, might have seen a steep mountainside in a pensive fog and caused it to come into view instead. This kind of difference is how art best mimics life. Taking the set of givens dealt by the accumulations of the past and the random motions of the present, and then making something--anything--of it is the central act of living, and isn't this, after all, what we each must do with the chance circumstances of our lives?

View the Sefolosha Image Gallery
Order the Limited Edition Catalogue
Read Roger Manley’s essay on Christine Sefolosha
Read Roger Cardinal’s essay: Christina Sefolosha: Painting Wild Beasts
Read the Artist’s Bio written by Christine Sefalosha

Three Visions: Christine Sefolosha, Michael Krauth and Sandra Sheehy
May 29-June 29, 2003 Cavin-Morris Gallery 560 Broadway New York, New York 10012
tel: 212.226.3768
www.cavinmorris.com
Exhibition Press Release