THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE OR HOW ART INVENTED EYES

"For the majority of molluscs the visible form of the organs does not carry much weight in the life of the member of a species, because they cannot see one another or at best have a blurred perception of other individuals and their environment. Which by no means precludes that stripes in lively colours and shapes, which appear to be brilliant in our eyes (as in the case of many snails' shells), exist independently of any relationship to sight".

Words paint a story: they tell of evolution and how eyes came into being in a fantastical, poetic and unfathomable way. In Italo Calvino's short story entitled "The Spiral", scientific theory and cosmogenic myth combine to create a humorous monologue. The story of the earth is laid out before us in time lapse from the perspective of a mollusc.

In Vanessa Conte's dense chalk paintings, originated in the style of the powerfully evocative images from the text, abstract and concrete forms merge with one another, geometric shapes assume recognisable forms only to dissolve again in the next moment. Spaces and surfaces are woven together into long runs, taper and lie on top of one another and yet the continuously spiralling narrative thread is concentrated in the individual compositions. Compositions on the cusp of representation and abstraction are both pseudo-scientific and decorative at the same time. Blurred shapes, imagined and dreamed, unknown and somehow familiar, transform themselves into geometric symbols and anthropomorphisms.

The mollusc, Italo Calvino's main character and first-person narrator, evolves a shell around him, a wonderful, perfectly formed, brightly striped shell that as quick as thought was done, ultimately prompting all the other "amorphous, colourless beings" to develop the faculty of sight, i.e. eyes, in the first place.

"While we did the lion's share of the work toiling by the sweat of our brows, making sure that there was something to see in the first place, they quietly adopted the easy part: adapting their lazy, embryonic organs of perception to what there was to perceive, to our paintings" (...) "in short they made eyes for themselves at our expense".

What a metaphor for art and it's capacity to open eyes, indeed to create eyes! What an explanation for the artistic object that is not born of calculation, but rather of love!

Similarly, Vanessa Conte's paintings revolve around love and life, universal motifs and personal traumas, sexuality, bereavement and death, living and dying, growth and decay, equality and individuality. Ultimately the amorphous creature from the story and the paintings in their strangely transmutable existential condition are also metaphors for human endeavor, for human action since time immemorial, for metamorphosis and life's yearning.

"For the young mollusc, the whole of evolution with it's myriad open paths lies before him, and at the same time he can enjoy it, attaching himself to the rock as a flat, contented piece of mollusc flesh. Compared to the limitations which would later come along on, if one considers how much the possession of one form precludes another, if one brings to mind the monotony of everyday  life, which at some point will hem one in, thus I maintain that it was a nice life in those days".

The mollusc becomes an artist out of sheer love.
Vanessa Conte has always been fascinated by science fiction comics. It is then almost a matter of course that the transcending the boundaries of the real will feature as a theme of her art, which has obviously always been the case. It is thus not by accident that this American artist, born in 1977, chose Los Angeles to conclude her studies originally commenced in New York - Los Angeles, the place acknowledged to be the birthplace of the underground comic and subculture-art, pop surrealism and street culture per se. The artists here were the ones to introduce and establish the typical pictorial language as "West Coast lowbrow style" in the commercial art business. Vanessa Conte studied under Lari Pittman in LA. HIs compositions are a celebration of painting - brightly coloured, with narrative content, multilayered - and that is obviously something he has passed onto his student: a love of painting, of narration, of the skillful formulation of internal images. Vanessa Conte gives free rein to painterly imagination. She tells a story, the images of which are but mere hints, fantastical and realistic, closed and open. Hints and suggestions for further associations to be made.

" 'But precisely because I didn't have a particular form, I felt that all possible forms were inside me, every gesture and grimace and possibility for generating noise, even offensive ones', says the mollusc of an early stage of his lfe and continues: 'With a word there were no boundaries for my thoughts which by the way weren't thoughts, because I didn't have a brain to think them with, each cell thought everything thinkable from itself everything at once, but not through images, because images weren't at our disposal at all, but rather in that indeterminate feeling, of somehow just being here, which didn't in any way preclude the feeling that we could exist in any other way'".

Vanessa Conte's enigmatic work is, when compared with her older black and white charcoal drawings, extraordinarily bright, seuctive and playful. A dgree of tension exists between the surrealistic spontaneity and the old masterly care evident in the painting, as well as the openness and transmutability of her forms and the scientific characteristic style of her narrative.

It is only recently that Romanticism and emotionality have re-concered their niche in art. However, even nowadays it is not considered especially "cool" to lay one's inner life open to scrutiny, as the painter Georganne Deen has duly commented. And so the natural detour that Vanessa Conte has chosen via pseudo-scientific fiction would seem to be a possibility or at least an attempt to treat her own threatened feminity as subject matter without having to be all too unequivocal or personal about it.

The spiral in its infinite guise in the story by  Italo Calvino is a metaphor for love and the eternal development and growth in life. The artist incorporates these qualities into her painting in the spirit of kindred transformation. The history of evolution in the pictorial narrative functions as the representative for the telling of ones own (possible or real) story.