| Buzz Spector (2009) |
| The Form You Have That Instant Taken: |
| The Paintings of Dianne Lauble |
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| Exhibition Catalog Essay: “The Form You Have That Instant Taken: The Paintings of Dianne Lauble,” Galleria L’Isola, Trento, Italy, 2002 (English and Italian translation) |
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| The relationship of things happening |
| at the same time is spontaneous |
| and irrepressible. |
| It is you yourself |
| in the form you have |
| that instant taken. |
John Cage, Silence |
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| The Buddhist concept of ichinen sanzen holds that a single moment of life possesses 3,000 realms, a concept that comprises a whole worldview and explains the way all phenomena are engaged in a mutually inclusive relationship. In the delicate intimacy of Dianne Lauble’s paintings, we can understand life as the feathers of a bird or the cosmos as the vast but fragile potential of an egg. In fact, her commitment to ichinen sanzen suggests that we take the next step and recognize that our viewing of her paintings is itself a moment of infinite potential—we are the macrocosm, the interconnected universe of these smaller worlds. In their graceful insistence on our recognition of relationships, our acknowledgement of the infinite, and our consideration of paradox, these paintings question our dulled, unexamined beliefs about ultimate reality. |
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| Her representations of birds, eggs, flowers and other natural objects exist within indeterminate spaces; they float in a mysterious glow. This background, sometimes suggesting landscape, or sky, hints at the eternal, evoking an infinite space the way gold backgrounds in Byzantine paintings contextualize the specific and temporal into the timeless. And these objects, a coalescence of marks and strokes that caress the forms into existence, have their own way of suggesting time through the rituals of mark-making and the repetition of shapes, sometimes as a volumetric form and sometimes as a diagram. The calligraphy in many of these works also contributes to our thoughts about the infinite; they are bursts of momentary energy, tangles of undifferentiated form that suggest infinite unrealized choices. |
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| Lauble accentuates the indeterminate and the unpredictable with references to empirical science. The paintings refer to various conventions of scientific illustration and to her own work as an industrial designer: diagrams, arrows, boxes for text and labels. These signs are another way of knowing the world, but they are no more authoritative in these paintings than a spontaneous smear of red in a shadow. And the birds—are they dead scientific specimens or are they painted from life, ready to fly? At any moment, anything is possible. |
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| Birds are an ancient metaphor for human lives. In her paintings Dianne Lauble combines various possibilities of this metaphor in striking ways. The paintings constantly remind us of the old paradoxical question of which came first, the bird or the egg? But her interests are more in tune with processes than with single origins. She is more interested in the observation of Nichiren Daishonin who wrote in his 13th century Letter to Niike about another paradox, that of the egg being liquid but then, at some point, flying over our heads. |
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Endings and beginnings are necessarily connected; in her paintings melancholic darkness is necessary to glowing hope. The paintings are about light and dark, the transient and the eternal, the measurable and the infinite, the spontaneous and the predictable, the rational and the intuitive. For Lauble, these conditions are mysteriously connected. In the words of Nichiren Daishonin:
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Life at each moment encompasses both body and spirit and both self and environment of all sentient beings in every condition of life, as well as insentient beings—plants, sky and earth, on down to the most minute particles of dust. Life at each moment permeates the universe and is revealed in all phenomena. (The Major Writings of Nichiren Daishonin) |
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| In her conviction that all phenomena exist within each moment of an individual’s life, she makes paintings that demonstrate her belief in the constant and continuing interaction between the phenomenal world and ultimate reality. |
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| © 2002 Galleria L’Isola - Trento |
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