Testimonials

LIZETTE ARDITTI

Lizette Arditti's travelers of shadow and light walk through an ancient world, captured in an archetypal moment by the artist's hallucinatory gaze. Lizette imbues her colors and textures with a light crafted with love and awareness, and in these paintings she offers us a testament to the persistence of the ephemeral: these travelers have touched their landscapes and territories, and the traces of shadow and light they leave in their wake irrevocably transform the world.

Ricardo Vinós

Summer 1982

LIZETTE ARDITTI'S PRESENCE

Revealing her inner wonder, a feminine world that, in continuous renewal and confrontation, assumes its own specificity, is what Lizette Arditti strives for in this selection of oil paintings in Tepoztlán in 1988.

Without narrative concessions, austere, Lizette Arditti handles her artistic space as a treasure: her wonders are her wealth, a sum of experiences, none of them gratuitous. Therefore, nothing will be false or accessory. There are no boasts. Most of the time, a minor key of intense dramatic charge.

The permitted and the forbidden, tangible reality and the reality of dreams—territory of the feminine myth—coexist. Painting of revelation, where the interplay between the mystical and the erotic, that delight that we women deny, suddenly appears and leaves us speechless. And alongside that silence and its allusions are the portraits, that pretext for the image.

In the portraits, passion and excess are controlled. The clouds where these figures are situated suggest distance, but more importantly, estrangement, the impossibility of communicating, loneliness. Perhaps the constant in this work, its unwanted revelation, is loneliness. Loneliness amidst which the beings and the Tepoztecan landscape evolve.

A harmony of delicate notes where she does not penetrate. She is invited, she is a spectator; she peers, she attempts, but she neither penetrates nor possesses, she never transcends the quality of being invited to a moment in the lives of these beings that passes by her like clouds. Cruel internal portraits, to which she lends dramatic accusation precisely through the pastel tones, the pinks, her careful elaboration of suspended time.

Her landscapes are private zones; they belong to a memory, to someone who is absent. Here, melancholy is a state of repose, a consequence.

Without easy charms, Lizette Arditti's painting has something unusual for a young painter: a proposition: the libertarian flight that illuminates her.

Eugenia Echeverría

Tepoztlán 1988

THE MYSTERIES OF WOMEN

The landscape of Tepoztlán is the setting for the portraits.

They've arrived here: they are someone's daughter, someone's sister, a dark-skinned man with whom we once rode on the bus. Suddenly, they turn out to be people we know too much about, old acquaintances, ties of spiritual kinship draw us toward their image captured in pastel tones.

Is this the shamelessness of the portrait, the transgression of personal secrets? In this society of discreet standards, is it right to worry, to speculate about that girl reclining against the wooden column, too close due to the complexities that Lizette Arditti's brush reveals to her? Is it right to covet the candor we never had, the gentle transition of Eva Camila?

The portrait has become, in Lizette Arditti's work, the space of her sincerity. The intuition of the other and the revelation of the other.

The image names and compels us to see.

The careful design and the small number of motifs that frequently recur from one painting to another reflect the coherence achieved in recent years in the daily and ecstatic artistic practice. They demonstrate the strength of her coherence in an almost ascetic attitude. They tolerate neither luxury nor rhetoric. As if an order, as if a stubborn attitude of personal purification, were leading her by the hand.

Eugenia Echeverría

JARDIN BORDA, INSTITUTE OF CULTURE OF MORELOS, CUERNAVACA, MOR.

MADE IN TEPOZTLÁN

“Lizette traces the ineffable in the mist of the instant, when the sun becomes abstract charm and concrete outcome, when the moment is the plenitude of memory, perception, and enchantment, when the traces of years lived, of wounds received, and of victories celebrated culminate in the breath for a new approach and renewed energy in color and figure.”...

Alejandro Chao B. 2002

EX-CONVENT MUSEUM OF TEPOZTLAN, MOR

FOUR PAINTERS FROM TEPOZTLÁN

“The search for reality in the abstraction of thought and in the hesitant action of the canvas, the brush, the hand, and the paint; the search that keeps one's gaze fixed on the world that fades and is absorbed in love; the search in the small, fleeting details that fill the eternity of being and becoming in the breath of work before the whiteness.” of the canvas and paper, before the chromatic explosion of gratitude”

Alejandro Chao B. 2002

MEXICO CITY LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY PREMISES

THE LIGHT THAT TRAVELS IN THE WIND 2002-2003

“The painter's desire to capture in her hands, and trace in line and color, the texture of the air, of the water, of the turbulent clouds of sunsets and sunrises that reveal the spirit; not in the mist of words full of meaning, nor in the polished naturalism that portrays and defines the world where fire shines and ennobles conscience; but in the acidic, sometimes stormy truth of everyday circumspection, temperance, diligence, and reverence that peers through the window...”

Alejandro Chao B.

PAPER MIRRORS

Lizette: We shared a time of water
Of integrity, certainty, affection, and work.
We were able to foster the emergence of an atmosphere,
Substantive, creative, and honest.
It was a time of risk and challenge.
Lizette: You managed to engender the crop,
Concluding this fruitful period.
Here are your "paper mirrors"
Watercolors on cotton paper
Which are like pieces of mirrors,
Which reflect our human nature.
Reflections of water, which move our depths
Sensitive, our ports of liquid light,
reflections that reveal our fragmented image.
Colored beacons that build bridges over the abyss of the present
In a vertical and non-transferable time
Where there is no return
Leap into the void, vertigo of colors
Polar contrasts, precipices in existence, irreplaceable in being herself
Unrehearsed present
In which Lizette chooses her own destiny
Unmoored from familiar ports
From the total existence of the present
Intuition and innocence, powerful action
Without doubts or fears, she dialogues with the accident
And lets herself be, in the will to power
In the entropy of light and color
That make time explode in this sensitive present.

Huascar Taborga

PAPER MIRRORS
RECENT WATERCOLORS BY LIZETTE ARDITTI

We are not exactly looking at one or more surfaces that reverberate images, nor is the reflection made of paper; however, it does float on it, from it, and flows toward the observer like a cryptogram, a coded spiritual text, within whose realm the observer involuntarily ends up searching for itself until, in the best of cases, it manages to glimpse itself. That which inhabits that summit or abyss never ceases to move. Its agitation on the page, first, then within us, and finally, transformed by virtue of this other imago mundi, returns, prodigal daughter, to its place of origin, now as a play of mirrors between the creative and the recreating spirit. In the end, after much looking, the eye becomes a burning mirror, with which extremely high temperatures are obtained, gathering the sun's rays at its focus. But it is the inner self that ignites, and paradoxically, the paper saves, functioning as a lifeline upon which the artist has left the imprint of human endeavor, a craft of brushstrokes.

The history of art is, in essence and from almost any perspective, the gradual discovery of appearances.

Based on this premise, the main difference between ancient and modern art is a loosening of moorings, a liberation from the anchor to the visible world: therefore, in the case of contemporary art, it is taken for granted that there are multiple ways to see or read a painting; to open the valve, the marvelous capacity to observe, from any vantage point, the ambiguity, a defining and intrinsic characteristic of abstract art. Fortunately, today we can surrender ourselves to a previously unthinkable variety of interpretations. All this, provided that aesthetic pleasure, in the form of Diogenes, reaches those of us on this side without deception, reminding us of something, suggesting it to the discerning.

Eye of dawn, without pupil; a solitary eye, a solitary sight that offers the body of nothingness; or that makes its way, leaving color behind, shedding tangible and ponderable garments, emerging as pure light...

What could it remind us of? A dream? A search or need for a foothold, a shore to help and allow us to breathe deeply again? Forgiveness, expiation? And if masks were set aside, if generalizations were set aside, if everyone were included in everyone else's world, what did it remind me of? A poem about water, precisely, that I wrote many years ago, part of the section "The Elements of the Heart," from the book Aurora, titled "Water," and subtitled "Out to Sea": I saw you in the distance, from very far away, but you weren't lying in the boat, on the horizon. You were walking, hiding some destiny. Your expression was unmistakable to me. Your saffron cloak, a living urn. I thought you were calling me. I ran my fingers over your skin, longing to keep it in the memory of my heart.

Through the mist, your eyelids trembled as you felt me. And so did I. The rose of worlds turned until it withered. It became light. Not a single tear in its folds. In its cool center, your haunting eye, filled, for the first time, with an irrepressible tenderness.

You had just died, dawn, in the dark night of my body.

For me personally, it evokes something profound, a significant, meaningful organism of words, the echo of a sphere of another order. To others, it may—and surely will—suggest a wide range of feelings, events, countless happy or painful matters, by virtue of what needs no explanation (it shouldn't have any): art.
Volcano, immense mouth, that screams and invades all the air, not only that which surrounds it. It summons water to quench the thirst, the burning heat of the earth.

The artist, Lizette Arditti in this case, reproduces light, something extremely difficult without the necessary tools. This comes from years of cultivating not only an expressive medium, but also the path it offers to the inner self, to truth and beauty, to well-being and misery face to face, taking risks, accepting challenges, even if they involve dissonance, personal downfall, a so-called mistake; in a word, affliction. Depending on the medium chosen to communicate all this, the artist will offer their discoveries in a more or less subtle way. Here, watercolor takes center stage: flowing gently yet intensely, it enters the sphere of time and, in its own way, explodes the present. As if the elements with which it moves possessed their own consciousness, as if the human being were merely a vehicle, a consciousness in turn, yes, but of different dimensions.

Emily Dickinson possessed the words that Lizette Arditti seems to have harnessed with her brush. Both share that kind of dialogue between nature and human nature:
I think water is the root of the wind,
it wouldn't sound so profound,
if it were a product of the firmament,
airs of a bottomless ocean.

Listen to the tide, blow,
Mediterranean intonation.

There is in the atmosphere alone
a maritime conviction.

Is it the universe itself that enters the scene, thanks to a reality that sees itself, becomes itself in others, or is it light that enters the scene? I think it's the latter, something overwhelming. By virtue of light conceived as an absolute character, in whose trajectory everything is constantly changing, things adapt to their own destiny, to their own time.

We, the observers, are, properly speaking, mere deuteragonists whose role—in the role of Lizette Arditti—is to open our eyes underwater, to become graspable or ungraspable depending on whether we choose to represent our lives with integrity, offering them an inner meaning. In other words, these watercolors have cast a liquid veil over us to help us assume our true contours and, by virtue of a fish-like perception, recognize ourselves in their mirrors.

Pura López Colomé

SYNCHRONIES

Synchronicities of poetic and polyphonic convergences with the disturbed rock formations of fractals that dissolve and slide into the colorful water of hopes and sorrows, accompanied by the rhythmic chimes of those villages far removed from the noise and still attached to the blue-green Earth shaded by flocks of sepia and gold…

Synchronicities of flowering branches with the generous winds of the Tree of Life that link the sky of an integrated cosmos to the sharp pain of glimpsing the underworld where loved ones dissolve, are reborn, appear, and dissolve in aimless and purposeless turns, without that symbolic precision that requires the fine line or the metaphorical shadow of volumes sunk in visionary dimensions…

Synchronicities of a negative worldview that allows the appearance of landscapes that the girl's soul preserves in memory, along with the passage through the thorny trials that offer life, death, and tenderness To be reborn in the cornfields and the mountain pines that gave way to an ocean of joy, swimming against the ominous Silence that threatens…

Lizette plays with amusements and Synchronicities until she falls within herself to surprise herself, contemplate herself, and manifest herself with that veiled and luminous glimpse of the organic abyss and the ineffable void that matter yearns for from the moment the blank page is filled with the clamor of color and renewed energies…

Welcome be the sweet and vehement Synchronicities of the tearing apart that conjures the powerful forces of enchantment on that portentous summit that implies the tranquil acceptance of life…

Alejandro Chao B.

NUANCES OF THE PATH

Where do paths lead? In her recent works, Lizette Arditti doesn't seem to be seeking answers to that question; she doesn't paint destinations but rather views in constant motion, like those that unfold before the eyes of a traveler without a predetermined route.

The surprise, the luminosity that is both space and form, the rises and falls of chromatic intensity—and always the fine lines that never become contours, that never enclose anything but indicate that one can pass through, that we are on a path and that adventures await us—these are the fabulous elements—visually and emotionally fabulous—that most delight me in Lizette Arditti's works, in addition to the meticulous generosity, if I may say so, of the execution.

The idea of the path implies continuity, but accidents can occur: landslides, unforeseen obstacles, and even definitive breaks. In her diptychs and polyptychs, the artist uses the formal and coloristic possibilities of these mismatches as additional dramatic resources; especially in her three-dimensional mobiles, constructed with painted wooden blocks that the viewer can place at different angles to one another, producing shifting planes of light and juxtapositions according to their own taste.

This exhibition, so unique in all its facets, requires and deserves the full exercise of our capacity for contemplation.

Roger von Gunten

"In the flesh of the world, the gods bleed out."

Antonio Colinas

"Let's go to your poetry,
Arm in arm with a night ablaze.
There, the day is painted
with the mineral colors
with which a spiritual arrow strikes the mark
of the most beautiful, a little sad, burning."

Carlos Pellicer

Lizette Arditti, painter and dear friend, has been captivated by the immense mounds of earth that impose their ancient grandeur on the landscape surrounding the town of Tepoztlán. From this infatuation, she has established a dialogue with the land. With this language of reliefs and birds, of peaks and trickles of water, of ravines and fissures, of fires and droughts and new growth, she has created a chromatic correlative.

In a back-and-forth of strokes, in a dialogue between her finitude and the eternity of the earth, through the approach and retreat of the canvas, between precise forms and patches of color, like the ebb and flow of waves, like a synchronicity of rhythms between inside and outside, Lizette, filled with faith in the healing effects of light, has been recreating that place where the fertility of the earth is a promise fulfilled. Thus emerges, in her own code of color and form, the pictorial discourse that the language of the Tepozteca land has helped her shape. From her lived experience, Lizette Arditti, through countless hours with her brush, has managed to construct her own peaks, her cloud-mountains, her body-mountains, her earth in motion, her blessed earth, her own earth.

Cristina Carpizo

MEMORY IN ITS NATURAL WAY (FRAGMENT)
PAINTINGS BY LIZETTE ARDITTI

(...)Throughout almost forty years of living alongside the Tepozteco mountain range, Lizette has engaged with it in many ways, through oil paintings, prints, and watercolors, focusing deeply on that micro and macro cosmos, her very peculiar and Mexican equivalent of Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire.

(...)From the moment I saw the first examples of Lizette's work, I realized that they were part of something in constant motion, a path already laid out and yet to be traced, which, without complacency, aspired to the evolution that can only occur with a frank and almost devout work ethic, and the daily learning that this entails; By stripping away everything that smacks of the arrogance of someone who considers themselves a genius or enlightened, Lizette's art increasingly offers a congruence between the individuality of a craft for which one is born and the necessity of inserting oneself into a collective world, both small and immediate, and vast and, seemingly, very distant.

In this current universe of installations and interventions, of frank artistic virtuality, I have always placed her as an eccentric and anachronistic daughter of the Turner and Constable tradition. Between these two predecessors, she has witnessed both the peaceful and the roaring sides of this world, nature and bodies in conflict. She softens Turner's fury and intensifies Constable's tranquility. Never passively, Lizette's art has brought forth rocks, downpours, beings that rise and crumble, modifying our way of seeing and conceiving them.

(...) Its skies are seas; its seas, skies. Its fire is sun; its sun, infernal mountains. Its moon among storm clouds reveals a nonexistent sea that floods a valley: it is an astral presence that, always full, a crystal-clear image of a superior world against the dark backdrop of our smallness, diminishes our egocentric perception, and brings to a waxing crescent the plurality of meanings. So much so that the canvas itself seems to want to shed its skin, showing us its scars on surfaces of sky blue, indigo, and royal blue, heading towards a nameless, luminous place beyond the peaks. On that other side, the Tepozteco mountain range rises as a polar landscape, displaying its icy, iceberg-like personality. An eye has opened in the middle of a recognizable scene, splitting as it divides it in two; a cascade of solar water flows freely without burning or quenching, it simply passes, like everything else, one might say, to burst in our faces. But there is something kind in the scene, something that doesn't want to harm us: it wants to lift the veil that has prevented us from undergoing a transformation; it wants us, upon returning to our daily lives, to see things differently.

When painting, Lizette inhabits a kind of out-of-focus half-sleep, the space of a capital-Me Memory where, by discerning interpretive keys, she distinguishes herself: she has learned not to delve into supposed facts in the realm of the creative world, not to be inspired by themes, but to await revelations of another order.

The luminous element bubbles in all her paintings. It creates whirlpools, vortices, that threaten to engulf us, but leave us on this side. Because that clarity saves.

Pura López Colomé
“La Voz de la Tribu” number 6 (excerpt)

From the Outside In...

“…and I could be

your companion on your wandering through the skies,”

Ode to the West Wind

P.B. Shelley

She paints her vision of nature.

Of her innermost nature.

Without aiming to be descriptive, at times she approaches figuration.

In her work emerge what appear to be crags, cliffs, suns, moons, clouds: foregrounds and backgrounds.

Because if there's one thing she knows very well, it's painting techniques, which she adapts and recreates to bring what she's feeling to the canvas.

For our benefit, she has painted every day of her life.

Representing the landscape closest to her.

Recreating her relentless, enveloping, and sometimes astonishing surroundings.

Recording only what allows her to evoke.

She discriminates against filth, bitterness, and everything that stifles the ethereal.

She paints to purify her surroundings.

She has made her craft a daily practice, a thoughtful and methodical discipline that requires interest, inspiration, and refinement.

She doesn't waste time or opportunities to experience everything.

She has been able to extract extra possibilities from transparencies and glazes, which in her landscapes achieve the necessary atmosphere to transport the viewer to the territory where her longings reside.

Skillful as she is, Lizette Arditti invites us to glimpse the rugged contours of Chichinautzin, and we end up exploring with her her rich spiritual universe.

Edgar Assad Gtz.

June 5, 2021

Tepoztlán, Morelos

THE NEW NORMAL

On my recent visit to Lizette Arditti's house, I found a small, clean, and baroque space, centered around the kitchen, surrounded by a garden, and facing a rocky outcrop in the Tepozteca mountains.

Upon entering her home, I was reminded of the description Edward James, the builder of "Las Pozas" in Xilitla, made in 1948 of Leonora Carrington's studio in her apartment in the Roma neighborhood: "Leonora's studio had everything conducive to making it the true matrix of true art. Extremely small, it was a poorly furnished and not very well-lit room. [...] The place combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, dog kennel, and junk shop. The disarray was apocalyptic. [...] My hopes and expectations began to grow."

James was particularly struck by the relationship Carrington had between painting and cooking. She considered the influence of food on painting to be healthy. Lizette also loves to cook and doesn't make any radical distinctions between her activities; especially cooking, painting, reading, and thinking. The space is interconnected. It seems very well furnished with a variety of implements. Eggshells mounted on other objects, with which the artist creates interesting crackled textures, occupy part of a table covered in dripping paint. Jars full of paint, brushes, a few paintbrushes, the easel next to the refrigerator. The walls display her countless paintings, past and present, done on small, medium, square, round, and rectangular supports.

In the painter's home, I find Tepoztlán everywhere. The Tepoztlán mountain range that she works with, reconstructs, and reinterprets is based on the principle established in the last century by artists like the Swiss Paul Klee, who believed that Art, with a capital A, makes the invisible visible. Lizette's paintings are made of layers of paint and veils that distort the photographic documentation of nature, avoiding simply illustrating the mountain. Her process involves deceiving the truth to extract from it meaning, sensation, the certainty that, as René Magritte maintained, her mountains are not the mountain. But they produce an aesthetic feeling. Her forms astonish us. They are constructions of intense color and a rich texture of industrial acrylic paint, applied to smooth supports and amate paper. The veins of the material converse with the brushstrokes and the dense, almost overflowing structure of the paintings. Her works form surfaces completely covered with colorful overlays, in tones close to those of the painted walls of Egyptian tombs. It is on these tumults of color that Lizette practices all the pictorial games and techniques at her disposal; but her core journey is sfumato, updated by the whims of a brush that is not afraid of the unconscious, nor does it enter into melodrama; she paints a concrete vision.

It's one thing to perceive the natural beauty of our spectacular Tepozteca mountain range, and quite another to create landscapes in two-dimensional spaces with paint. Caring for fire is important, but creating it changes the order of things. Sigmund Freud wrote an illuminating passage on this subject in Totem and Taboo, in which he places the art of his time within the realm of ancient magic, as a transformer of the world from the other scene, that of dreams, of ideals; of the need to somehow make present the absences, the longings, and the flaws of life.

Lizette's painting evokes landscape artists and techniques from other times and places. She identifies with the Chinese-French painter Zao Wou-Ki. Her work incorporates the sfumato of Leonardo da Vinci and the Impressionism of Claude Monet. In particular, the interplay of her flowers in the water. And just as Monet, though not an abstract painter, abstracts light at the heart of his vision, and just as William Turner, the English Romantic, animates clouds and fog to produce dramatic works, Lizette plays with glazes from classical and modern times to convey the sensual joy of covering and revealing unexpected forms, of concealing and exposing nature's wonder in a different way.

Irene Herner

Presentation at the exhibition in La Sombra del Sabino

Tepoztlán, May 8, 2021 (pandemic year).

Lizette Arditti Sirotcky

“I don’t know if I invent the world I paint; I think it’s more that the world invented me.”

Leonora Carrington

More than 50 years have passed since Lizette Arditti felt the undeniable desire and conviction that led her to dedicate herself fully to painting. From then until now, her work has unfolded through an imagination that ranges from her loved ones, her surroundings, nature, and that revelation that empowers every creative act. Between portraits, landscapes, and something we could call organic abstraction, the artist aesthetically recreates an imaginary world that seems to be out there, through the window; but which is actually a reflection of the inner self, of the soul and the heart that materialize from contemplation to their plastic manifestation. A process that has always found ways to transform reality.

Lizette Arditti’s painting is, above all, a journey. Through her works, one must walk, let time pass, and discover figures like leaves and flowers, raindrops, or rays of light, moving to tell an infinite story of change. For this is how nature works, between sunrises and sunsets, reborn and transforming, recycling and flowing. It is from this natural movement that the artist reveals to us the possibility of traversing mountains, trees, rivers, and even fires; of passing through, being passed through, and transcending in the awareness of discovering oneself as one with everything.

This exhibition is a tribute and a respectful and moving recognition of an exemplary artistic career. And it is something more, something beyond; because it does not operate with the rhetoric of retrospective but rather prospective. Here we will not see works grouped by themes or dates in a straight line looking backward. Instead, through a deconstructive curatorial approach, new readings and associations are presented, diverse relationships and resonances between the works, weaving together small stories, like pages of a book. This is about opening up aesthetic possibilities for emancipation, for demonstrating a living, current, and relevant artistic practice. It's something like discovering, seeing again, and revealing unexpected apparitions.

“Translucent Paths…yesterday and today” is also a celebration of life, nature, love, and art; an open invitation to join the cause of care and admiration. There is much hope, more humanity, and a great deal of radical tenderness, which we so desperately need to free ourselves from a world in flames. Today, during the Anthropocene apocalypse, we are experiencing suffocating temperatures, irreversible droughts, fires, extinctions, and the imminent total annihilation of our species. But here, walking along these translucent paths, it is not like that. On this path, it is not difficult to understand that water is worth more than money, that no one is saved alone, that cooperating instead of competing is the only way to transcend. How different everything would be if, instead of capitalizing on our environment; Let us act like those Romantic painters who, through their beautiful landscapes, had already warned of the consequences of mass industrialization. Beauty, contemplation, harmony, and why not say it, even happiness, are revolutionary in our time. In the artist's words: "For me, painting is life."

Antonio Outón
Deputy Director of Research
MMAC

PAINTING AS A STATE OF BEING

In the work of this Mexican painter, one can find boundaries between the abstract and the realistic, between what we see and what dwells within us. An exhibition brings together 132 pieces from various years and using diverse techniques. It was necessary to gaze at the clouds for a few moments to begin discussing the work of Lizette Arditti. There is a poetics in the fleeting nature of these accumulations of microscopic water droplets and ice crystals that eludes us: to look at the sky for more than a couple of minutes is to remember our finite and unstable condition in the face of a world beset by human and environmental crises, where speaking of beauty is a radical act. Fortunately, the work of this Mexican painter exists to bear witness, for a moment that can feel eternal, to a firmament that is also an apparition. Waters, seas, skies, fires, and tree trunks are some of the motifs that appear in her figurative work, which is transmutable into the abstract. Arditti (Mexico City, 1947) has dedicated herself to painting for 50 years and also works as a psychologist. Her works, in various formats and media, speak to us of nature and the call we have as humanity to care for it. For the artist, “the flow of painting is like the flow of human life,” and therefore, they are intrinsically linked. Currently on display at the Juan Soriano Museum of Contemporary Art in Cuernavaca, Morelos, is the exhibition Translucent Paths… Yesterday and Today, which brings together 132 pieces by Arditti, from various years and using different techniques. The curation of this exhibition is not conceived as a timeline, but rather groups the pieces as if they were small narratives that find their meaning within the totality of the exhibition space. The interpretations viewers can bring to the pieces are as diverse as the works themselves: one can approach them through the color palette, the thematic threads revealed in the repetition of images, the supports, or even the installation, which, viewed from a certain vantage point, seems to trace the outlines of the mountains depicted in the paintings. Our gaze does not move linearly through the space, so experiencing the exhibition feels as if we are about to traverse the landscape itself, perhaps as if it were traversing us. Contemplation here becomes an active and playful gesture, where it seems we are viewing a collection of memories that, precisely because they are so anonymous, belong to us all. Lizette Arditti has lived in the town of Santo Domingo Ocotitlán, in Tepoztlán, for many years. And while the mountainous landscape of this place is present in his paintings, Arditti doesn't paint the images as he sees them. Instead, he undertakes a process of translation based on memories that coalesce into images on various planes, creating metaphors and allusions to reality. To establish an initial understanding of his work, it's important to discover the transparencies in the superimposition of fragments and the multiple layers that inhabit his paintings. The layers I'm referring to don't relate to the pigment itself, but rather to the way he manages to capture the different tones of light, day and night, through successive applications of diluted paint.

There's a gesture in his painting style that particularly catches my attention, a brushstroke that seems to originate from somewhere else, not necessarily from the obvious depiction of nature. Alongside his love for the natural world and its processes, his portraits of his family, his attention to the changing tones over time, and his micro and macro close-ups of what could be roots, mountains, fires, moons, suns, shadows, and light, there are brushstrokes that escape the logic of the figurative to find expression in the power of the abstract. This act, powerful and beautiful at the same time, makes her works remain in my imagination and makes me think of them when I read the poetry of Susana Villalba, who closes one of her texts with these verses: “the art of being still is to give one’s heart to movement the wind whistles an echo of what already announces my detachment would the water sing if it did not flow through me? crouching within myself I await another moment of the earth: a temperature of love that melts even stones.” Many of Arditti’s works are titled “Water” and a complement: “Galactic Water,” “Symphonic Water,” “Living Water.” There is one in particular that I observe and through which, with greater clarity, I recall Villalba’s question. I think that Arditti’s painting is precisely a portal between what we see and what dwells within us.

Regarding the future of painting, the artist is clear that as long as there are children with a box of crayons, painting will continue to exist, “because painting is inherent to human beings. It is completely surprising for a child to see that from a movement they make, something more emerges, something more is projected.” After the experience of observing her work and discovering those boundaries between the abstract and the realistic, of feeling that the pieces speak to us of something new, that they construct a narrative where one doesn't necessarily exist, the love for simplicity and for life itself, through painting, endures.

There is no discourse explaining the pieces, although there is a lucid and sensitive gallery text written by Antonio Outón, the museum's deputy director of research. But Arditti's work embodies a collective voice that acknowledges her teachers (in recognition of the schools of painting), as well as the shared teachings of those dedicated to the care and contemplation of the Earth. The act of painting gives her the possibility of creating previously nonexistent images, while the gesture of looking at her work, as the exhibition text states, allows us to “transcend into the consciousness of discovering ourselves as one with everything.”

For the artist, painting is life, a state of being, and here. In this exhibition, there is nothing more than that: the power of knowing oneself in the present, a fundamental part of existence itself.

Translucent Paths… yesterday and today.

Letras Libres, July 18, 2024

Maria Olivera

Morelos Museum of Contemporary Art, Cuernavaca.

IGNITE CLARITY

Iridescent clarity emanates from the eyes

As it settles on the canvas, the renewed landscape comes alive

Colors glide down ravines

to contemplate the mystery of life

The environment stirs within us

The emotion arises from contemplating that which

only wishes to express itself

with textures and colors

Inks, watercolors, oils

inert come to life on misty rocks

In that ethereal, subtle, meticulous

banquet of creation

that infuses spirit into the landscape

in the joy of being represented

Elena de Hoyos