Perhaps it would be necessary to start by pointing out what we consider a misunderstanding when talking about the work of Patricia Van Dalen: the insistence on the preponderance of color. To be sure, color plays a very important role in her work just as it does in proposals as different as those of Mondrian and Bacon. Nevertheless, the excessive attention paid to this "display of color" has left the more complex formal evolution staged in this work in a blind spot. From the perspective of this evolution, color is just one of the elements that make up the visual-intellectual space of a tension; a tension we would like to call form/formless, as it simultaneously reveals a will to form and a drive that undermines it. A review of the different phases of this work could help us make this more explicit.

Van Dalen's first works show a tendency towards the fine line usually found in drawing; perhaps as a result of her training in the field of design, as she herself has pointed out. At the time of her first individual exhibit (1985) we see this line disappear along with the white background, to give way to thick strokes of color. In the works of her following exhibit (1987), these strokes are increasingly inscribed in the painting as dynamic spots that overlap each other thus blurring out their contours. The painting embodies here to say it in an almost figurative term a "stormy" realm. It is precisely at this point that a new facet appears (or becomes evident) in Van Dalen's work: the collage; a facet that is going to operate as a counterpoint to that realm. What is surprising about this fact is not the alternating of the media in itself, but the discursive character it starts to articulate in relation to the more strictly "pictorial" work. Pastel colors which are completely absent from her paintings appear frequently as background; and although it is true that primary colors are also present in firm streaks, it is not less true that they appear along with drawing lines, and that both, as elements, combined with the glued fragments, integrate into a search for a more concerted dynamics, with a discernible movement that establishes a sort of reading pattern. These two facets, clearly separable only at this stage, will begin to interact dialectically in her later work. Thus, in the paintings exhibited in 1988, we witness the return to the stroke with an important variant: color acquires a will to shape that was evident in the collages of previous years. More than dynamic spots, what we have here are color zones in which strokes establish a movement of a more "discursive" order. This process is stressed to a greater extent in her next individual exhibit at the Sala de Exposiciones RG (1990), in which the painting, drawing and collage media start to exchange the features that had defined, and so distinguished them at the beginning. The drawings incorporate the fine line, frequently a spiral, which had appeared as an organizing element in collages; the collages now show strips similar to the brush strokes of the paintings and insist on presenting a frame, which is also glued; lastly, the large format paintings combine the color spots with cuttings that display a composition in themselves, thus revealing themselves as miniature paintings. Nevertheless, in comparing them it becomes evident that the dialectic mentioned before is still active here: what in the collages seems to be guided by an organizing drive that gives the impression of an orchestrated floating, in the paintings is subverted by an overlapping drive that interrupts time and again any attempt at a reading. At this point, Van Dalen's work reaches the maximum level of the form/formless tension. In some paintings of the "Huracán" exhibit (1992) the collage-painting is literally shattered: the stroke movement disappears almost completely to give way to a fragmentation in which the painting, far from striving towards a shape, becomes a "fragment". In others, this fragmentation opposes, within the same work, the reactualization of the more or less formless display of color. The tension turns momentarily, so to speak, into an absence of shape that the cut elements sometimes concealed by the paint that covers their edges intensify. In a kind of formal compensation, the paintings and the installations of her exhibit at the Sala Mendoza (1993) take up mostly a concrete subject: the flower. The collage disappears, but in the paintings the thick, strong color strokes converge for the first time in this work towards a figurative intention, constrained of course by the pressures of the formless associated in this work to the stroke that makes it manifest. At this point, the form/formless tension seems to be about to collapse. Nevertheless, this is an unsolved tension, even an unsolvable one: it has become the generating element of this work; a work that seeks to define, to build itself in terms of this tension. Thus, in Van Dalen's later works, we witness a restating of the tension. The collage and painting media seem to separate temporarily as if to recover their physiognomies. On the one hand, in her 1995 exhibit, Van Dalen goes back to the "pure" painting. We are, however, far from the "storms" and the "hurricanes" of colors. The basic colors are now blue and yellow; and even though the thin strokes, which had found their way into the paintings from the collages, are present, they do not necessarily establish a movement here, but a kind of punctuation to the display of pure spatiality. On the other hand, by the end of 1996 Van dalen exhibits a series of collages that mark her return to the exploration of the medium. Cuttings painted beforehand reappear as traits, which now proliferate all over the collage-space with no discernible reading proposition. It is this restatement, this redefining process that constitutes the prelude to the exhibit "House/Garden/ Windows".

This exhibit proposes, as its title states, three spaces both determined by a relative independence and joined by a conceptual line that we could identify as the fact of dwelling in the world. The exhibit's emblem is the intervention of the Library building: the image of a house leaning against the upper part of the facade. The house, as conceived of by Van Dalen, is the house of a child's drawing: a house we do not inhabit but invent, create. In this sense it is impossible not to see here a profound relationship with the evolution of the meaning of this work we elucidated above. The house is made of rectangular blocks (the size of an ordinary building block), which are actually scanned reproductions of actual paintings combined at random to form the silhouette of the house. Is this not a form of "second degree" collage? The blocks-paintings make up an image that no longer strives towards figuration but rather embodies a metaphor and a conceptualization: to inhabit a visual space. The house must be understood then not as a refuge, but as the act of abstraction that endeavors to construct a space in order to situate existence in the world. As a counterpart to this, Van Dalen's "garden" proposes another way of staging the form/formless tension. The random layout of the little flags is combined, and contrasts with the latticed organization. This gesture emphasizes the human and abstract character of the garden; a character that although frequently forgotten, is evident, for example, in the Japanese garden. Not just nature, but nature redefined for the inhabited space withdrawn from the contingency of elements. This is essentially a "painted" garden (Van Dalen had already resorted to the "concept" of garden in her interventions at the Sala Mendoza, the II Bienal Barro de América and the recent Bienal de Guayana). Finally, the "windows" incarnate the most suggestive metaphor of the title. In the first place, the window is the medium that integrates the inside and the outside, in this case the house and the garden. There is a rich tradition of meanings associated with the notion of window. The window is the gaze: the eyes are the windows of the soul; Leibniz's "monads" were isolated because they had no windows. Another no less important aspect is the fact that the window does not constitute a pure gaze, a simple opening to the world, but prescribes, cuts out a field and frames it within a defined context. It is perhaps to Magritte that we owe the intuition of having established the deep relationship between the window and the painting; a relationship Van dalen has chosen to take on for her exhibit, with a new turn (Van dalen returns here to the collage-painting of canvas over canvas). We do not just see paintings, windows to that conceptual world that unfolds before us: that same world is transformed when we look at it through the "windows" of the three-dimensional glasses. It is in the playful interruption of the gaze that the object of the gaze is brought into play. These paintings-windows are undoubtedly the articulating element of this exhibit. Like the house and the garden, they do not escape the dialectic from which this work has been generated. We had commented that in the stage prior to this exhibit the painting and collage media had been explored once again separately. They now reappear integrated into a tension which, although unsolvable, seems to have been assumed, accepted. The collage elements are now superimposed onto the color displayed in a calm spatiality and organized according to a more openly geometrical disposition. In this regard, three novel and symptomatic aspects must be emphasized. In the first place, these rectangular cuttings as in the case of the house blocks become at the same time micro-paintings, which creates a kind of mise en abîme. In the second place, we can recognize fragments of floral motifs of previous paintings in some of those cuttings; fragments that intimate a material defeat of the attempt at figuration. Lastly, and as a result of a surprising reversal, it is these superimposed cuttings that interrupt the possibility of reading that the "repressed" painting, now in the background, would make possible. The form/formless tension is still present; but in the process a displacement has taken place: now the formless inscription of color solicits a reading that the collage elements formally and systematically disarticulate. The will to form, which at the beginning reinforced the "legibility" of this work, now deconstructs it. The discursive character has become dissociated from the organizing pole of the tension in order to become an integral part of the formless drive. The tension has unfolded, duplicated internally. Furthermore it has become more complex with the third dimension added by the visual devices, which establish new interruption lines, and thus unexpectedly activates the vicissitudes of the form/formless dialectic that constitutes the generating core of this work.

As we can see, the "House/Garden/Windows" exhibit is not the final answer to the tension that this work has explored once and again, but its current stage. It could not be otherwise, since that tension has ceased to be an obstacle on the way to meaning and become the condition of possibility of meaning itself. It is the generating core of this itinerary; but already internalized, assumed in the very substance of the work, it turns into the element that generates new proposals, new actualizations. None of them will be definitive; they will all have to content themselves with exposing the provisional organization of an unattainable form.

Josefina Berrizbeitia
Luis Miguel Isava
Universidad Simón Bolívar
Venezuela, january 1998.