In difference from the abstract of 20th Century, the challenge today is to think beyond the crystalline flat surface and the division between abstraction and empathy and attain both the material and transcendent Subreality: through working toward compassion—beyond empathy—and beyond the pure abstraction that has rejected the organic and the space of depth. With my paintings, video and notebooks I hope to induce a surface crisis and arise some awareness to the potential of the feminine with its matrixial womb-depth-space in us and in the cosmos. In this paper I present the meeting between the translucent fore-image with its non-dimensional counter-space and the traces of trauma. With the attention to subreal encounter-events between the intimate and the cosmic in the feminine, art can humanize us still. Still humanizing, always humanaizing—like the figure of Eurdice, the feminine-maternal matrixial erotic antennae of the psyche is searching for a glow—a sign of possibility for being-toward-life. Is it possible to evoke a symbolic and figural being-toward-birth in a world that massively enjoys its own Death-drive via endless stream of images? Morphing colour-line-lights and working toward abstraction of the subreal while touching the wounds of human memory and oblivion of carriance, carrying the living, carrying the dead, wit(h)nessing and witnessing to the other and to the self— when the painting reverberates the strings that connect the human and the cosmos via substances of carriance it humanizes the sub-knowledge that it induces or conduct, transports and transmits.
Bracha L. Ettinger is artist-painter, artist-theorist and psychoanalyst working between Paris and Tel Aviv. Author of The Matrixial Gaze and The Matrixial Borderspace on trauma, memory, feminine subjectivity, maternality, ethics and aesthetics. Her recent shows include: Muzeum Śląskie, Katowice (Solo); Colori, GAM, Torino; The Image of War, Bonnier Konsthall, Stockholm; Encounters, MAS/KMSKA, Antwerpen; Lyric on a Battelfield, Gladstone Gallery, NY; The Haunted House / The Human Condition. National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; The 14th Istanbul Biennial. Professor of Art and Psychoanalysis, EGS, Saas-Fee.