The One and the Many: the artworks of Julia Townsend
Marcelo Guimarães Lima
The art of Julia Townsend is a unique combination of the practice of art as a rigorous discipline, one that requires time, effort, dedication and concentration, and the workings of a generous, free flowing imagination, unlimited or unconstrained by questions of ‘taste’ or ‘propriety’ in the arts.
Questions raised most of the time by those who have only an external understanding of art and artistic processes: for artists are committed to more fundamental problems, and have no time to waste with peripheral issues. They must follow the lead of their muses, the inner voice of passion and conviction, leaving to others to decide, if they wish, on what are the ‘proper,’ that is, the mundane ‘rules’ of the ‘art game,’ and other such trivialities.
In the paintings and painted constructions of Julia Townsend, ‘low-brow’ and ‘highbrow’ art forms, motifs and strategies seem to converse and collide. Canvas and objects are for her a sort of arena, a theatrical space for the collusion of images, signs, patterns, objects and animated beings that come to meet and exchange from sources located in the heart, in time, in memory, in geography and language, in things seen and things adumbrated or guessed in the many worlds and journeys of a life.
The Post-modern conditions has been conceived as one of displacement and shifting identities, of the anxiety about identity, of identity as this anxiety itself, as the abyss of individual and collective search for “stable foundations”, the search for firmness in a world of ruptures and accelerated processes of changes. Julia Townsend is an American artist who has lived abroad for most of her adult life: Germany, France, Spain, Turkey, and the UAE.
Coming from a culture that is contradictorily “universal” and parochial, conceiving itself, with different degrees of proper, historical awareness, within the ideological heritage of the Enlightenment, and in contrast as the exclusive embodiment of “universal” virtues and goals, a young, ¨monolingual¨ and in many ways insular cultural space, Julia Townsend lived many years in Europe and in the Middle East, that ancestral place of origins and beginnings. The fact that she masters many languages such as Spanish, German, Turkish, and also some French and Arabic, points to the depths of her multicultural experiences, at different places and different times in her life.
The Missing 'What' oil on canvas, 15 3/4" x 15 3/4" 2019
In her works, cross cultural and linguistic experiences merge into visual form as visual metaphors and metonyms. In her drawings and paintings, figures of thought and figures of language collide and amalgamate in a particular space or territory, namely, in the frontier between the sayable and the visible, and also beyond.
Julia Townsend work is informed by a sort of delight and at the same time an uneasiness with the visible world, the world of inner and outer images and signs, as if the goal of the artist is to preserve or recapture that experience of childhood of the unity of reality and dream. Terror and delight are one: the price to be paid for daring to open your eyes and face the multiplicity of the real, that is, the multiplicity of the subject in the extended reality and plurality of beings and things. The subject is both invaded by reality and embraces, assimilates, confounds itself to it: at the same time one and multiple, that is, knowing the anxieties of being both limited and without boundaries.
A sort of drama of enchantment, of retrospective vision and imaginary construction, the substitution of lost innocence by attachment to productive imagination is played in Julia Townsend’s art practice as a conscious challenge the artist puts to herself with the tools of knowledge, both practical and theoretical, of art.
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In her larger canvases especially, I believe she attains a unity of narrative and plastic elements that equate the artistic knowledge of an educated, experienced, and cosmopolitan artist, with that spontaneous imaginary infrastructure of subjective feelings and visions, unmediated, unruly and ungraspable, without which the work of art risks becoming only abstract intention, a sort of empty shell, an insubstantial ghost of our inner life and symbolic practices.
(revised)
Originally published in the catalog for Julia Townsend`s solo exhibition at XVA Gallery ‘Things That Go In, Out, Back, Up, and Around’, Dubai 2010
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