A brief bio of the artist
Alexandra Correa is a self-taught, independent Canadian graphic artist, currently living and working in Concord West, Vaughan, Ontario, Canada.
A Psychology and Sociology Honours graduate of York University in Toronto, and an associate scientific glassblower, Alexandra created original scientific illustrations and cover designs for over 80 scientific publications, DVDs and books which she co-authored with her lifelong companion, Dr. Paulo Correa. Together, and with the essential assistance of Dr. Malgorzata Askanas and a number of dedicated volunteers, they have run the Akronos Publishing Project and the Aurora Biophysics Research Institute (ABRI).
This website introduces, for the first time, a restricted selection of Alexandra's extensive fine art, photographic and synthetic digital collage collection. It is a celebration of the complexity of creation, presenting discrete, fleeting moments of searing intensity that touched her life. It is her homage to the miraculous matrix of life, through which we all have only the briefest of chances to travel.
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Alexandra's artby Izan Ader |
"Corazón batiendo fuerte Rodrigo Leão / Daniel Melingo - No sé nada |
"Tierra bendita, tierra linda" – that could sum up Alexandra's art and the great love affair she has had with this planet and all the living in it, distraught as the planet and the living now are with all that the pursuits of development, power and wealth inflict. And, likewise, her art cannot but be traversed by a profound "sentimiento de viajen", the most poignant emotion that any art form may ambition to record in the brief travels of every one of us across this tiny speck of the cosmos. Yet, her art knows something, something which one can only suspect is what the red squirrels - that she is so fond of and so tenderly captures in one of her series of "painted photocollages" - also know and so well display in their rapt attention: that life is a long combat with oneself to reach for the height of an eagle, for a finer perception of all that surrounds us and thrives within us. And we all know this is not easy, to make for oneself a soul – to gain and hold "a remembrance of things past" that will always insist in a present, that is capable of insisting in a present which desire wants to be eternal.
That is what Alexandra's art is: an active rememoriation that wants to imprint the senses and memory with a burning perception, fine and intense – the perception of something that cannot be forgotten. It brings tears, but they are tears of joy and generosity, and it brings laughter, but it is not the laughter of derision that human beings are so prone to; rather, it is the laughter of a cosmos that in all and to all remains sovereignly indifferent – the laughter of a warrior, in the best traditions of all savage cultures. Yet, her art also brings something else, a poetry of colors that ornaments the soul of the artist, a presentation analogous to a flower opening to the Sun, not a representation or a depiction of something. If, technically, many of her collages are not paintings, they are also not collages. Likewise, one cannot speak of photos – because they are not photos either. One could say they are the eyes of the artist, but they are even more simply just independent organs on their own, crystals of sorts, eyes in their own right, 'canvases' or surfaces of lines and colors that serve as gateways to a different perception of what we often treat as ordinary, and is anything but. And this can be said as much of her "digital art", as of her watercolors, gouaches, and acrylics – as well as her ink pen drawings.
Alexandra's compositions range wide. They run from the inorganic natural world to the worlds of the organic, the living, and reach for nonordinary perceptions that may appear fantastic but that she places instead in the subtle world of the Aether. It is the seeing of the artist that brings together the poetry of colors with the work of science, perception with cognition. And, evidently, this conjunction is the fruit of life's work in the sciences of the living and the non-living. This subtle world of the Aether intimately connects the book and monograph covers that she created for her own scientific works with a treatment of very different media, digital and analog, that transparentizes the colors and the figures, and as well with skies where different tonalities of azure can be found, always intense.
Throughout her work an abstract line unfolds on the canvas-turned-screen. Early in her pen and ink books, and frequently in her watercolors, an abstract line connects different organs or "organicities", as they meld one into the other across the lines and colors. It is a nonfigural line that decomposes and recomposes the figures, frequently faces or facial organs, and flows like the thread of a story or a journey in the comics of Moebius (Jean Giraud). Her own recomposition of the early work in the form of digital vignettes confirms this affinity of Alexandra's compositions with the graphic language of comics.
Her compositions form veritable series of distinct becomings, and the series of all the series is indeed far-reaching and systematic. Geological series of intensities where rocks, cliffs and mountains induce still, calm emotions, even in the middle of chaos, are followed by series of the plant world, where movement is captured in all the vivid, voluptuous colors of flowers (like In the Borage, Voluttuosa, Rêver, Columbine, Roses, Sublime, or Awake) and in brilliant, hyperreal trees that jump at the eyes ( The Sorcerer's Tree in Dreams). Her series of frozen and snowed-under trees, at night (the magnificent Winterscape) and during day storms, has the eerie sense of utter loneliness – the immense silence of the Great North. Many of these journeys into the plant world are found in Alexandra's Gardens, which for decades she kept alive with her spidery hands in the dirt, digging, seeding, tending with care.
It is with her gardens that the gallery opens - and there are stunning pages of color as she treats flowers with filigrained detail and bright hues ( Exquisite Columbine, Le'Chaim) – a hymn to resplendent life – or cascades of flowers or fruit (as in Cascade, Roses, or Apple Cascades).
Then comes the insect world in Insect Doings, with all the insect-becomings encountered by the artist – a world that most of us construe as a nuisance, but which plays a fascinating role in her art (see Cicada on Glass, Bee in Rose of Sharon Pollen, The Fine Art of Balancing), opening one up to perceptions of the very small in scale and detail, and most frequently striking one as bizarre ( Candy-Striped Leafhopper, Grasshopper 2)- perhaps all the more so as so much of human behavior is insect-like, has insect characteristics; we are reminded of this in the armored Head with Ants or the delightful Antman. Sometimes the odd joins the comical, as in her studies of ambush bugs - veritable living micro-gargoyles.
In a series entitled Wild Ontario, she chronicles some of her encounters with all types of lifeforms in her native region, whose slow but now inexorable degradation she has witnessed and made combat against for a lifetime. In fact, she has been the naturalist inspiration of the struggle of her community, Concord West, against the destruction of its natural and cultural heritage. One can say that here the artist takes her strongest stance – by making a chronicle of the most modest nature that urban development daily eradicates without second thought all throughout the great province of Ontario. For it is here that our unconsciousness as a species lies – that we can ignore the modest, the taken for granted, as it is of no use to politicians or advertisers, to sorry and costly spectacles of green militantism or political circuses of ecological marketing (see her series on red squirrels, or her Reflections on the death of the Upper West Don in Vaughan; or still her Forgotten Corner). One senses that underlying many of her 'canvases' there is a mordant sorrow which, if we were to put it in words, may have an ironical twist that says: "as long as one saves a rare species after many bureaucratic hooplas and fund-raising, one can feel something has been saved… when all else, the so-called ordinary, has been lost". The simple reality is that it is all life that is threatened by the unsustainable social structure and the sheer size of the human population of this planet.
The animal series arguably culminate with her view of the world of birds, where her 'canvases' reach for the "lightness of being" of beautiful creatures, freer than all, but also the most fragile. One cannot but detect a certain influence of David Attenborough's natural history in her photos, collages and paintings of birds. The bird-becomings are events of pure joy and admiration ( Grackle in the Grass, The Hunt), most frequently moments of individuation silhouetted against the azure, sometimes even as dark sillhouettes (like her perched cormorants in Lake Couchiching).
In Dreams she crosses between many of these series to mark becomings through the searing eye of the dream ( L'Oeil du Rêve with its exquisite texture) – witness the mescalinic Mushroom Man, the nostalgic Fox On The Road, the Dream of the Cranefly that evokes Paul Klee, the disturbing Musical and Dreaming with the Fish, or the marvelously translucent Chashmal. Something of the fragility of the living permeates these dreams of becoming – it may be a thin fox, or an Indian riding away with his back to us ( From Lakash to Urga), or a solitary dancer on the edge of an abyss, with the earth and the light of the sun as horizons. But Dreams also introduces the comical and multiform – the Singing Man, the Dog, the Hatchling and the unformed Cyclops that triggers a shower of light. One hears a sovereign laughter in Fernanado Faces his Fear or the mischievous Nepeta rubbing its nose on catnip. Her humor becomes biting in the wonderful cartoons of the Pen & ink collection. And death is never too far away ( The Turtle's Carcass) in the world of dreams – for, after all, life and the cosmos are all about the cycles of conversion, purely energetic events as evoked in Conversion or Through the Eye of the Eagle.
Some dreams are purely nonfigural or kaleidoscopic. Tapestry is a vibrant abstract world of swirls, as Lake of Fire is a molten world from which the swirl of geometry arises. Here, Alexandra's canvases philosophize with the abstract flows of nature by means of the gift of dreaming. A poignant case is Songs of the Plumed Bird, whose vibrant colors one can hear synesthetically as incisive cries of a song that befriends life and liveliness. The bird itself is hidden by the bright colors. One gets the sense that it is not a philosophy of the canvas one is presented with, but a canvas that philosophizes friendship with life. This is already apparent in one of her oldest productions: Nietzsche and his Animals, his companions plus baboon - a torrid desert-scape surmounted by a flying eagle that has befriended a snake that it carries coiled around its neck, as in Zarthustra's vision. A sequestered but rejuvenated Nietzsche faces his lion, whose eyes and enigmatic smile pierce through time.
In an heterogenous grouping titled La Dérive (Drifts) one encounters the historical world of human beings in old cities often de-peopled – a taste of de Chirico – but always peopled by animals, most often birds, as if bidding the viewer to seize the experience in the course of a perceptual flight. In the Pantheon of Agrippa (Rome) one finds a pack of wolves. The urban drift connects different territories – Portugal (Lisbon, Algarve, Alentejo, Ericeira), Spain (Barcelona, Guadiana region), Sardinia, Corsica and Italy (Rome, Siena). A sense of timelessness emerges from empty buildings that in silence tell the story of the life which once inhabited them. Sometimes it is the recognizable past, but at others it is our present which is framed as a past, with the canvas placing us in an abstract future – or maybe in "the eye" of becoming. Others capture a recent past where the old and the modern have melded, as in the Rua de Santa Justa. Judeophobia as marker of a self-destructive society is also a refrain in her work – a silent insistence that forces us to remember, as in Largo 16 Ottobre 1943 or Lest They Forget in Rome's Jewish Quarter. Another refrain is the evocation of the old Indian cultures of America – the Olmec heads, the Atlantes, the Castañeda allegory with its parallels to Nietzsche and his Animals. And still another, a distant Africa now forgotten in the sands of time ( Memoir of a Blue Man, Heat).
The savage or selvatic reconquest of urban spaces abandoned and depopulated also figure prominently in her work ( A desolate corner in Lisbon). Other canvases cast a mood of archeological desolation, like Behind the Theatre of Marcellus or the Domus series evoking Roman emperors and personages. Even the old electric tramway car in Elevador da Bica appears empty under the bright azure of Lisbon. The only signs of life anywhere are birds, sometimes local, sometimes notoriously out of place. Some canvases confront us with a massive continuity of nature with penal or military architecture, as in Arrival to Corsica (in which only an eagle breaks through the oppression), or in Bonifacio - Corsica hill.
But the drift leads on to rural settings, where still the signs of life reduce to indices such as the smoke from a chimney ( Cataluña farm). And still on, it leads to the coastal landscapes of the Algarve, or what is left of them. Here her canvases shed large areas of azure – setting the coast against it, and filling the rest with warm and lascivious colors, as if filling in one's heart the senses of freedom and energy which once, before the ravages of mass tourism, this land inspired in every visitor ( Buzzard dreaming, Falésia watercolor, Golden Cliffs of the Algarve, Expanses). From time to time we perceive silhouettes in the distance ( Falésia from Oura). But the solitude can be extreme, as in Sardinian solitude, with its streaks of turquoise sea between chaotic iron-brown rocks.
The landscape or detail canvases – like the images of flowers in city streets (whether in La Dérive or in Portugal flowers ) – are mediterranean or midi in colors and light. There is a greed for detail, as if a resplendence animated all life and objects, natural or man-made. One of the most beautiful of her vivid canvases is Lisbon Rua da Rosa. In contrast, the urban settings can also be dark and imposing, as if they formed a properly human desert ( Siena Passage 2); or they can instead yield pastels ( Gli Amici in Siena, with their back towards us).
Strange human beings also feature in her productions, beings of a savage or shamanic nature ( The Amazonian, The Refrain) engaged in old rituals - such as the production of fire - or emerging literally from the sands of time (as in the Huichol Medicine Vision), or still surmounting the silent stones of time ( Night of the Gypsy). In Siena, Piazza del Campo, where the "bar-a-barity" of the Palio still takes place, we see a prancing horse facing a sinister Dominican monk while a little boy appears to be watching. Other strange beings can be encountered in the beautiful mask paintings ( Mask with Headress, Mask with Bronze Headress) or in the full-length self-portrait of the artist.
One cannot but be taken by the dreamy quality of the most abstract of her works, such as her watercolors (here represented by a small selection) – witness the bright cosmic Sea Dreams that she transforms into the dark depths of The Underwater Mural. But some of the most delightful of those dream-plays are found in the Pen & Ink series (see, in particular, No.s 8-20), exuding a disquieting kind of volume. In the same vein are Time Whiperer and Zag.
Her Gaudi pictures stand as a series of its own – they are not mere images of the biological architecture and sculpture that he created, but unsurmised ways of looking at his exquisite work. Thus, for example, in her pictures of the Casa Mila chimneys that look like armored knights, she develops a whole poetry of Gaudi's mute obelisks, turning the armored Crusaders into Toltec Atlantes…
With hundreds and hundreds of canvases, it is impossible to exhaust a commentary, no matter how brief, on her painstaking labour of love. But if there is something that can succinctly be said about her work, it is that it forms a continuum of canvases, from the most abstract to the most pictographic, where each is, to borrow words from Fennimore Cooper in "The Deerslayer", "the moment when everything is distinct, even the atmosphere seeming to possess a liquid lucidity, (…) the moment when the senses seem to recover their powers". Today, as never before, this fragile "tierra bendita, tierra linda" depends on each of us human beings recovering the powers of the senses. Recovering our senses from the devastation and hatred we have inflicted, at our own peril. Alexandra's art is an appreciation of this planet and the cosmos, but also a warning to all of us – do not let the flame die, do not lose your soul. The whole planet now depends on this. There may not be a future otherwise.
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