We live in a world that has largely lost touch with spirituality. In art, there is a long history of representation of religious iconography and spiritual traditions. All of Emilia Azcárate’s work is related both formally and conceptually with vital processes, one of which is spirituality. Throughout her life, the artist has had the restless urge to explore different religions and spiritual traditions. Emilia was brought up in the Catholic religion, and used to attend mass as a child. In 1986 she underwent initiation in the Hare Krishna religion, until she stopped going to the temple in 2002 and gradually distanced herself from the creed. In 2012, in response to her continuing need for a spiritual link with some religion, she started to practice Nichiren Buddhism. However, it was her experience with Hare Krishna that led Azcárate to start to explore ways of articulating her spiritual experience and creating iconographies, both as an epistemological exercise in the understanding of its philosophy and as an articulation of its inherence in her everyday life and in existence as a whole. Owing to its constant connection and relationship between the spiritual and the everyday, the sublime and the mundane, and the body and art, Azcárate’s abstraction cannot be understood as a ‘purist’ aesthetic expression but as a flexible, comprehensive, and multifaceted form capable of including the complex relationship of the spiritual with reality, with her own subjectivity, and with the processes of life.
In 2012, the artist started to practice Nichiren Buddhism, a branch of Buddhism founded in thirteenth-century Japan by Nichiren Daishonin, which is based on the teachings of the Lotus Sutra and it is centered on chanting Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo in front of the Gohonzon—the sole object of devotion, a scroll inscribed with characters in Chinese and Sanskrit—and on studying its philosophy and having faith in order to activate the Buddha inherent in every human being, regardless of condition. The artist is currently developing three bodies of work related to this spiritual tradition: the Practicables, the Postales (Postcards), and the Gohonzon series. It is not possible to comprehend the extension and depth of Nichiren Buddhism through the intellect, so the creation of artworks related to this practice undoubtedly constitutes an intuitive, experiential, and sensorial way of understanding this spiritual philosophy.
The mandala is the most important and reiterative compositional structure in Azcárate’s work. It is repeated in a number of variants. After 2001 it recurs with bottle caps, and more recently, from 2012 on, in the series Practicables, and in 2013 with the Gohonzon, the central object of devotion in Nichiren Buddhism. The first of the artist’s series of concentric installations of bottle caps, which are structured in mandala forms, was produced in 2001 in Trinidad, a place where there is also a thriving presence of Hindu culture. They are made by collecting bottles caps from the various locations where her travels. For Azcárate, what is collected in them is the energy of that space, and the landscape and history of the place is stored in them.
The Practicables of 2012–13 are a series of small and medium-format paintings on wood that are placed on a surface rather than hung, and which the viewer can manipulate to create different compositions. These are direct paintings of enormous diversity, though always based on the use of the circle as a central structural element. For example, some circles are repeated successively within the paintings in horizontal or parallel lines, saturating the plane from one edge to the other. Other compositions are concentric, which creates a sort of vortex of energy and color.
The series of Postales, made with watercolors or typewriters, once again present a pattern made with the letters N, M, R, and K, but in this case also employing numbers such as 8, and exploring profound concepts extracted from the Gosho (teachings), such as mind-meditation, teaching-practice, practice-enlightenment, and word-concepts. The way in which the artist fashions and links the letters is both a form of iconography and nomenclature in drawing or painting, and a sequence with a rhythm, energy, and a great sense of abstraction.
A large body of the series of Postales refers to the letters of the alphabet and to other graphic forms, which also stem, in a more abstract way, from a spiritual necessity, since in their physical form as drawing they lead to a language and a meaning. Some of these “postcards,” created by means of a typewriter, are totally abstract, and constitute representations of forms of energy or rhythms that possess their own order, fluidity, and flexibility in the use of lines that are broken and irregular or organized in unpredictable ways, so that they float or intersect on the plane.
The works belonging to the series of the Gohonzon are highly complex, since their composition is articulated as an interpretation both of symbology and iconography on the basis of a structuring of the original Gohonzon. The Gohonzon is considered as equivalent to the Treasure Tower, an allegorical tower described in the Lotus Sutra that emerges from the center of the earth during the ceremony of the air to represent our potential for spiritual illumination or Buddhahood. The artist is especially fascinated by this tower, and combines its allegory with the form in which she recreates the Gohonzon, which is constructed in an abstract fashion out of compositions of circles that are associated and superimposed.
The Practicables, Postales, and the Gohonzon series can be read as an abstract articulation of the intangible process of awakening the Buddha inherent and latent inside us. According to the artist, they lay emphasis on the transit from the Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo back to reality, from effect to cause and vice versa. All these works share the concept that every moment of every day encloses an eternity of concentrated value. Their singularity lies in their rootedness in the artist’s life, offering us a personal, intimate, and private experience that might be described as profoundly human. These three series are now brought together on the occasion of the exhibition at Henrique Faria Fine Art, the motive for this publication, giving us an opportunity to appreciate this vital conductive thread in the work of Emilia Azcárate.
Emilia Azcárate (b. Caracas, 1964) studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, from 1982 to 1986. In 2006 she was accepted to the CIFO Scholarship Program at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami. Currently, she lives and works in Madrid, Spain.
Azcarate’s work has been exhibited in Centro de Arte Los Galpones, Caracas (2008) Casa de América, Madrid (2004) and Sala Mendoza, Caracas (1998). Azcárate has also participated in group shows, such as CIFO: Una mirada múltiple, selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba (2012); Return, Casa de América, Madrid (2009); Notes about abstraction, Berezdivin Collection, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2008); Jump Cuts, Venezuelan Contemporary Art, Mercantil Collection, Americas Society, New York (2005); The curse rib, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain (2005); Prague I Biennial, National Gallery, Veletrzní Palác, Prague (2003); São Paulo XXV Biennial, Cities, Metropolitan Iconography, São Paulo (2002); and I Salon Pirelli of Young Artists, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Imber, Caracas.
Azcárate’s work is been acquired by both public and private collections, including: Sayago and Pardon Collection, Los Angeles, California; Ella Fontanals Cisneros Collection, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami, Florida; Mercantil Collection, Fundación Banco Mercantil, Caracas; Banesco Collection, Fundación Banco Banesco, Caracas; Berezdivin Collection, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, Fundación Cisneros, Caracas.
Extract from "Full Emptiness and/or the Inconclusive Infinite" by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill in Emilia Azcárate, N.M.R.K., Madrid: Turner, 2014