The Art of Jônatas Channel
The performance titled “A Painter and a Ballerina (Part I & Part II) is a strong commentary on the human power of adaptation through defiant mobility, courage, hope, faith, love, and self-belief.
The result of this performance fits within the ”gestural abstraction” and ”action painting” categories, meant to emphasize the physicality of painting. Thus, through these movement-based artworks the artist evokes issues of dislocation through time and space (i.e. migration), as well as of adaptations which occur through the process of hybridization. Due to this, this performance is conceptually linked to the Diaspora Creature collection and In Thy Tent I Dwell – Jonatas Chimen’s latest museum installation about his family’s 500-year history of migration.
In ”A Painter and a Ballerina (Part I and Part II) Jonatas Chimen engages professional ballerina Samantha Hope Galler in an unscripted artistic collaboration. In this performance, the classical dancer delivers a free-style choreography while the artist studies her every move. As the ballerina takes brief pauses, the artist attempts to capture her pose, movement, and even her perceived emotions. There is strong communication which occurs between the two artists throughout this performance, which covers much of the emotional and rhythmic spectrum contained in art. All of this is translated into what finally remains: Two colossal abstract expressionism works of art.
Conceptually speaking, the A Painter and a Ballerina performance (Part I & II) is about adapting to life’s unforeseen situations, where changes occur at all times. This is shown as the painter pursues the dancer with his brush, paint, charcoal, and several other mark-making tools at hand, until they both succumb to exhaustion. Interestingly enough, it is the attempt to anticipate these happenstance occurrences of life which brings us into an existential dichotomy; for anxiety and fear (as portrayed in part I) emanate from the lack of certainty, which congruently, is also responsible for producing life’s greatest pleasures, appeal, and beauty – as portrayed in the colorful part II of this collaboration.
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