Natasha Krenbol - Self-portrait

For Naïma

Wings to soar above life

To paint a picture, to write a poem, is to capture the wind and embrace one's share of madness.
Wings to soar above life, said Vincent van Gogh.

As a child, I painted and drew all the time. From an early age, my father, a native of Cairo, introduced me to Egyptian hieroglyphs, calligraphy, and geographical depictions of the world.
Later on, graffiti fascinated me in the same way.

I work with rudimentary materials: water, pigments, canvas, paper, and colored pencils.
When I begin, it's chaos, like at the very beginning of the universe.
I work the material, cover the surface, I scratch it out, hide certain parts to let shapes and characters emerge.
My brush draws no hierarchy between animal and human.
It's an archaeological dig — art-chaos-logic…
The canvas infuses slowly; as if it's dictating the tempo.
I do not plan what I show; I discover it as I paint.
I love that element of the unexpected in the process of invention.

I wanted to give things I could control, and I strictly stuck to what I had in my heart.
Paul Klee's diary

It is my view of the world that I paint.
One glimpsed image leads to another, then another…
The painting takes shape, layer by layer, until it finds a kind of balance.

Painting is not a profession; it's a way of life.
An archaic, definitively outdated way of relating to reality.

I have never painted a recent picture, said Man Ray.

Only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century and who manage to perceive the element of shadow within them — their dark intimacy — can be called contemporary, writes Giorgio Agamben.

N. K.

Bastet
In this world we walk
on the roof of hell
and we look at flowers Issa Kobayashi (1763-1828)

education

1978-1982

École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris

1985-1986

Kala Institute, Berkeley, California

group exhibitions

solo exhibitions

Camarillo

Nourished at the sources of blues, jazz, and the ancestral music of all the continents, Natasha Krenbol is among those artists whose global culture and mixed blood seem to contain the memory of every vanishing ethnic group: one in a family of primitive and cosmopolitan poets who belong to the larger family of endangered Mother Earth.

Her works draw their inspiration from what is commonly termed the "Third-World" and from contact with countries where life is simple and resources are often scarce. No wonder that her works should open frontiers, which in her opinion, should have disappeared long ago.

In the process, another mental life became familiar to Krenbol. For her, "objective chances", signs, encounters form a web that makes everyday life mystical in an age when life itself is surrealistic.

For her, painting is total commitment, a way of life, of breathing, as is music that accompanies her everywhere. She offers us the possibility of seeing other tunes and other blends. Her paintings are full of life: there everything dances and everything moves.

Animals, plants, human beings, imaginary creatures, all beings are of equal merit in Krenbol's universe, where the small and the great are of equal importance in the eyes of the Creator. One senses a particular tenderness for the one thousand and one small, essential details of contingency, which form the miracle and the charm of existence.

It is here perhaps that resides the secret of what gives so much life to these works: the superimposition of at least two worlds, two concerns, at variance and at the same time complimentary, just as in life. Poetry rediscovers the space of free expression, and one senses the freshness of an unfettered and talented improvisation.

Laurent Danchin

writer, art critic — translated by Elaine Walsh

Triomphantes vibrations

the Krenbol pulse

By playing with "reserves", Natasha Krenbol's creatures, like fragments of reality temporarily detached from the world, parade graffitied and stained — rude, to say the least. Their dancing poses of enjazzed animals let one guess the smile that accompanied their invention (let us rather say revelation).

This rowdy, carnival-like painting is the work of a person deeply moved, as is necessarily anyone who can see that mankind walks on its head. Our effigies are more alive than us; more animal and musical, more friendly. Unlike us, our Krenbolized doubles do not kill, do not plunder, do not dream of being predators. They are authentic savages, inhabitants of Utopia, eternal non-place, a nomadic retreat of poets and wise fighters.

Natasha Krenbol has clearly learned more from African streets than from Old Europe's museums. She considers storytellers and bluesmen wiser than bourgeois aesthetes, and paints as a non-aligned worker, heedless of fashions and mercantile diktats. She was a crow in a previous life.

I recently acquired one of her canvases showing two blind men guiding each other through chaos. Noticing this image, impressive in its savagery, a visiting craftsman declared solemnly: "it pulses". One could not put it better.

Enzo Cormann

writer, playwright