The
Spiritual Exotic: Nicole Bigar’s Imagery
an essay by Donald Kuspit |
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What are we to make of Nicole Bigar’s rather dramatic sculpture
of a horse? It is certainly unexpected in her oeuvre, which is
largely devoted to painting. But Bigar’s horse concentrates
in its body all the energy and elegance--demonic power and suave
complexity--made abstractly visible in her paintings. The sculpture
does in fact have an oddly abstract expressionist fluency, as
its animal curves indicate. The two raised legs form a kind of
angular foil to the tense graciousness of the curved back, so
reminiscent of the tomb horse figurines of T’ang dynasty
China (seventh to ninth centuries). Indeed, there is an Asiatic
cast to Bigar’s horse, as she says, acknowledging her numerous
trips to that continent. Bigar’s monumental horse is a kind
of signature piece, all the more so because it signals her breakthrough
into a new sculptural painting and her enduring commitment to
the timelessly exotic figure. In traditional Chinese art the horse
embodied the “inner vitality” that Chinese theorists
thought was the mark of artistic quality. Bigar’s horse
has this inner vitality, and so do the figures--mostly female--in
her new relief paintings.
Most of these figures are made of sand--the same earth to which
the horse is close. Some of it is dark, some of it white; all
of it was found on the beaches of the Hamptons where Bigar lives.
Some of it is applied directly to the canvas, forming an eccentric,
oddly automatist surface--I am thinking of the first inspired
sand paintings made by the Surrealist André Masson in the
mid-twenties, and of the great importance the Surrealists gave
to texture and touch (think of Max Ernst’s frottage technique)--and
some of it is attached to cloth, for example, burlap, and plastered
to the canvas.
It is at once a collage device and pure surface, simultaneously
raw and refined. Perhaps most importantly, at least for me, Bigar
uses it to make her primitive, elemental females, all exotic emblems
of the eternal feminine, as Goethe called the force that leads
us onwards and upwards. But of course mud figures will crumble
into dust--thus the dust to dust of death that completes the life
cycle. Bigar’s earth material confirms the earthiness of
her female figures, but it also announces their vulnerability.
The paradoxical meaningfulness of Bigar’s medium informs
her figures as much as it lends them their savage grace. They
convey tenderness as well as intensity. One cannot help recalling
Gauguin’s description of himself as a “civilized savage,”
and more broadly the idea of the “noble savage,” when
looking at Bigar’s earth-bound females (Mother Earth is
unavoidably evoked), but one also has to acknowledge their mirage-like
transience. They are, after all, fantasy figures symbolizing a
female ideal that has gone out of fashion in Western society,
where woman has been liberated from the myth of sacred womanliness--she
is naturally sacred by reason of her power to give birth--that
informed traditional thinking of her, as evinced by her use as
an allegorical personification of the virtues and arts. Like Bigar’s
horse, her organic female figures signify the ego strength that
expresses itself as joie de vivre, but joie de vivre is an exotic
emotional phenomenon in our technological society. Thus the figures
are emblematic of a forgotten optimism, as their sometimes fragmented
character suggests. They epitomize a spirituality that has become
exotic in our brutally materialistic world even as their fragmentary
character hints at its violence.
I think Bigar is fleeing from that society--and defying the machine--when
she celebrates the Buddha, as she does in several sculptured earth
and colorful paintings. She is looking for enlightenment and life-affirmation,
and she finds them in an Asian society remote from ours--a society
which, however rapidly it is modernizing, retains spiritual values
that ours seems to be losing, or dismisses as besides the point
of techno-materialistic progress. In a sense, Bigar is a female
Praxiteles recreating a spiritual ideal--for that is what her
females embody--that seems to have succumbed to modern reality.
Thus it is only a half-truth to think of Bigar’s females
as primitive, however primitive the figures in Mother and
Child, Ancient Presence, Om, Meditation,
and Peace (all 2005), not only by reason of their material
but their form. Their primitive “naturalness” signals
their archetypal character. Similarly, however much Bigar’s
images, whether sculptural or entirely painted--she has said that
she once wanted to be a sculptor as well as a painter--seem to
have been made by a child, this signals their innocence and expressive
directness.
There is nothing arch about Bigar’s images and methods--a
virtue these clever, cynical postmodern days.
The Sun Came Out, a 2005 work declares, and spreads its
light on all creation, confirming its sacred character, as the
pointed arch in Bigar’s picture suggests. We must live in
the Here and Now where inner and outer light are inseparable--which
is what the Buddha teaches in this 2004 work.
There is the courage of light--a sign of inner vitality as well
as the vitality of the universe--everywhere in Bigar’s works.
It informs her blazing colors, and she often lets it shine on
its own: the canvas becomes a field of light on which the figures
float, even as they stand on their own. There is a quixotic speed
to Bigar’s handling, conveying the instantaneousness with
which light travels and the spontaneity of creativity.
Indeed, in the last analysis Bigar’s works, for all their
celebration of meditation and femininity--their not so subliminal
eroticism and strong occult import (her mud figures are, after
all, voluptuously rounded and fleshy, and inherently mysterious)--are
about keeping creativity alive, and with that achieving happiness.
Jung has argued that when life becomes meaninglessness the only
thing that can save it is creativity. The shadow of meaninglessness
does not fall anywhere in Bigar’s works--it is striking
that there are virtually no shadows in her pictures, only radiant
atmosphere--because they are alive with creative energy, which
is the real secret of the inner vitality the Asian masters cherished. |
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information & larger view click on any illustration or title
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Diptych
2004-2006
Each panel:
Oil, sand & mixed media on canvas
measures 48 x 60 inches (122 x 152,4 cm) |
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Guardian
2004
Oil, sand & mixed media on canvas
30 x 30 inches
(76,2 x 76,2 cm) |
Buddha
and Friends
2004
Oil, sand & mixed media on canvas
48 x 48 inches
(122 x 122 cm) |
Burma
Here and Now
2004
Oil, sand & mixed media on canvas
48 x 48 inches
(122 x 122 cm) |
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Rythm
2004
Oil on canvas
24 x 30 inches (61 x 76,2 cm) |
I
Am A Burmese Goddess
2004
Oil, sand & mixed media on canvas
48 x 48 inches
(122 x 122 cm)
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Dames
de Jeudi
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
40 x 48 inches
(101,5 x 122 cm) |
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Happy
Life in Burma
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
46 x 48 inches
(76 x 122 cm) |
Peace
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
48 x 40 inches
(122 x 101,5 cm) |
Peru
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
36 x 40 inches
(91,5 x 101,5 cm) |
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Queen
of Sheeba and her Djinns
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
48 x 48 inches
(122 x 122 cm) |
Mother
and Child
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
24 x 24 inches
(61 x 61 cm) |
Hummm!
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
24 x 24 inches
(61 x 61 cm) |
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Meditation
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
48 x 48 inches
(122 x 122 cm) |
Om
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
48 x 40 inches
(122 x 101,5 cm) |
My
Lady
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
30 x 30 inches
(76 x 76 cm) |
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Ancient
Presence
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
36 x 36 inches (91,5 x 91,5 cm) |
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Quack
2004
Oil & mixed media on canvas
30 x 30 inches
(76 x 76 cm)
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Zoom
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
36 x 36 inches
(91,5 x 91,5 cm) |
Side
Buddha
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
36 x 36 inches
(91,5 x 91,5 cm) |
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The
Sun Came Out
2005
Oil & mixed media on canvas
36 x 30 inches (91,5 x 76 cm) |
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