They, whoever 'they' may be, say that many artists, the truly inventive and most challenging, are in fact, ever-so-slightly, at the very least, mad. This may well be true, sanity is overrated, it has brought us everything from religious conflict. to world war, to the ever nearer collapse of the ecology and society as we know it. Great thinkers of the past, as artists, have been invariably ignored or ridiculed in their own brief excursion to this planet, their words, actions and deeds usually, for the main part, greeted with a defensive derision that stifles difference and embraces what many consider to be the norm.
People, be it gifted or cursed, with a unique vision of the world around them have a fundamental choice as individuals, they can 'put up and shut up', toe the line, keep their heads down and hope that no one realises what a freak of nature they truly are, or for the few and the brave, they can make the momentous choice to explore their individuality, their absurdist visions, their perception of what, who, why, when and where. If they're lucky enough to live in a tolerant enough society, at a moment in history where the romanticism of the state, science and God's own will has failed the people, they can sometimes even invoke change, which in turn can on rare occasions, induce something of a Zeitgeist, a revolution of the perceptual senses and stranglehold of a faux logic dictated by convenience and the fallibility of power.
Jaime Pitarch can for me be counted amongst that number, his work may be ignored on the whole, due mainly to the implicit psychological reservations of those around him, or perhaps in a time to come his influence will take hold and the world will finally learn to mould around his foresight, either way he has been marked, deeply and profoundly in a way that few others could tolerate, let alone utilise for creative purposes. In some small way I feel a kinship with Pitarch, our stories are very much askew, our perception affected in a variety of different ways, by different tangible and intangible events, yet I can feel it from the moment I first viewed his art.
Whilst I, through a decade of self-abuse, which for the main part took its form in the continuous ingestion of small doses of LSD, at times which have helped me to cope with my 'flattened vision' of the world, as one wise man who never existed once told me in a hallucination "perspective isn't real, the third dimension is merely a series of two dimensional images pasted together in order to prevent the mind from breaking down", Jamie Pitarch's journey has been a far more noble sufferance, borne out of one event, a split decision whereby she attempted to rescue a drowning woman from the River Thames in London. This single and most harrowing experience tipped Pitarch over the edge and back again, he has seen beyond the surface of what we as a race consensually project as the consensus of reality, and all she has as proof of this other place where the will of the masses and the human paradigm cannot and will not take hold, is his mind and therewith all the visions locked within.
I have throughout my years of self-therapy and reintegration into society attempted inclusion and acceptance, continually focusing on the subject matter of society and its concerns, analysing the false gods of celebrity and the broken empiricism of power that is government. Pitarch has on the other hand proverbially stuck to his guns and literally dragged back impossibilities, undiluted by the opinions and perceptions of those around him, objects and images that lie somewhere between the now almost tepid realm of surrealism, tinged with a cynical nostalgia of several generations of strangeness and quirk brought on mainly by a cocktail of excessively horrific war and chemical explorations of the mind, and somewhere beyond, somewhere almost forbidden.
Pitarch functions as a mathematical formula, a machine, a filter, a processing plant where raw materials of a mundane nature are transformed, almost alchemically, into objects which jitter and judder, flickering between the mundane and the impossible, the functional and the absurd. Taking it a step further, one could say that Pitarch disassociates meaning from the act of perception, which for myself is a constant and most particular personal fault, Pitarch dives headlong into this abstraction, embracing a psychological flaw, brought about by a traumatic event, as would a scientist who has, say, discovered the existence of unlimited renewable energy, or the key to the manipulation of the temporal field. A magic key to an invisible door which opens up a meta-landscape of possibility is hers for the taking, and she has, with both hands.
My 'trip vision' is for me less than a disability, perhaps in some ways an advantage. It too is entwined within a theatre of perception that houses a million micro-events, each imbued with a duality of both the banal and the outer reaches of what might rightly be lingering just outside the realms of accepted possibility. We, patriach and I, most obviously share a love of mistakes, errors, keys and clues to the fragility of reality and the chance that the merest quantum event could put paid to the Newtonian and falsely empirical system of existence within which we as a race nervously hunker down and shield our delicate understanding of our own place in the universe. A spanner in the works, a collapse of coincidence, a moment that forces all others around it to pale in comparison.
These 'blips' in time and experience, these flaws, are for some artists, scientists and madmen, what we live for, chasing one to the next in some (almost always) vain hope that eventually they will disprove the assumptions of the majority and verify our own personal and meticulously arranged hypotheses of the true nature of reality. We are all travelling, as a race, in the same direction, under the banner of linear time and comparitive logic, relying on the confirmation of others, in most part from both the most respected minds and general opinion, as an assurance that our behaviour, ability to communicate, and vital understanding of the world around us, is true.
Patriach goes further than any other artist to successfully capture the chaos of existence, freezing the deeply human conclusive data, which for the most part is borne out of a lack of a far greater perspective, our sense of relativity being limited by the fixed standpoint from which we believe we understand the universe around us. Much like an insect might understand the surface of a picnic table, objects without apparent purpose, reduced for the sake of convenience, to base elements and values reliant upon nothing more than survival, and instincts which drive that creature to exploit these substances to its own advantage.
When one speaks of impossibility, one must place their words in context, the context of living upon a world that were it but a few miles closer or further from the sun would not be able to harbour life. In a body that has evolved from creatures, namely mammals, who rightfully would never have existed if it wasn't for a meteoric cataclysm that extinguished any predominant race before us. In a mind capable of creating and destroying almost anything within its grasp on a monumental scale, whilst simultaneously being able to communicate the possibility and possible outcome through a spectrum of emotional and relativistic tangents, and yet reduce it to a mathematical paradigm within the same breath.
We are impossible, man is impossible, as is life, and even reality. Yet it exists, and so does Jamie Pitarch, an explorer of this unquantifiable realm, a returning conqueror of the unknown carrying with her objects of one or many parallel realities, proving, at least on an emotional level, that we do in fact exist in far greater multiverse than we allow ourselves to comprehend. For me Pitarch makes me feel something akin to a creative coward, I seeking art's resolution to my so-called perceptual disability and inclusivity in reality, in turn her work inspires me to eventually remove the cloak of shared efficacy and meaning, and venture forward away from the contemporary, beyond the consensual, and on to pastures of meanings new.
See more of Jaime Pitarch's work at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery.
