edith urban · image of poetry, poetry of the image

The presence of texts – generally fragments of poetry extracted and inscribed into the body of the colour – is a constant and defining feature of Edith Urban’s art. But what is the relationship between painting and poetry in her works? Generally, simple juxtaposition and an insubstantial connection between image and text is the greatest risk and constant limit affecting artistic practices that attempt to relate text and image.

What makes Edith Urban’s works so unique is precisely her creation of a substantial and fruitful connection between poetry and image: she is able to create a single organism, in which words assume a figurative, textural plasticity, whilst the painting abandons any temptation towards objectiveness to embrace the subjective dimension of the psychic landscape that is the domain of poetry.

Edith Urban’s painting develops around a kernel of text, generally consisting of a fragment of one or two lines, which is itself a »portrait« of the nature of poetry and the way it reveals itself in illuminations, flashes and intuitions. This flash that illuminates a piece of reality by isolating it as a fragment, in other words maintaining its uniqueness but decontextualizing it to suspend it in an indeterminate space within the universe, is the substance of poetic language. The text itself is simply a fragment, a shard of mirror reflecting a piece of reality in order to suspend it in the void, as an isolated and absolute image: a world, in essence, an entirety suspended within the mystery of a universe that embraces it without revealing itself. And since the paradoxical convergence of partiality and universality is the most typical feature of poetry – which itself is a fragment of truth that emerges through sudden illumination from the darkness of reality – to reduce a text to a fragment of itself is to reduce it to its essential root, and at the same time multiply its power exponentially: the poetic entity, reduced to one or two lines suspended in the void, more powerfully reveals its essence as a shard of the world that becomes a mirror held up to the whole world.

So this radicalisation and distillation of the essence of poetry forms the starting point from which Urban constructs her image: the same approach is transferred to the image, as a process of stripping back and reduction to its essence, a condensation of reality into three elements: 1) a few structural lines, generally horizontal or vertical; 2) a fundamental chromatic dialec­tic opposing solids and voids/positives and negatives, in other words areas of transparency set against reds or blacks; 3) occasional points at which forms are compressed, translated by the little spheres – like bombs composed of colour and matter – that populate the artist’s psychic and poetic landscapes like subject-objects perennially multiplying and repeating themselves.

As in poetry, in Urban’s image-landscape, any hierarchy between things – the element that shapes and holds together reality as we conventionally understand it – is thrown into crisis: forms, relationships and roles dissolve as they contract into themselves (through the compression of matter and colour, or horizontal lines that compress and contain) or announce their own disappearance (through transparency and the repetition of forms, in other words a dimension of echoes and progressive dissolving).

Transformed in this way, the image becomes a cosmogony of a new world, naked and polycentric, in which everything is subject and object. This new world is simply the true image of the world, an image on the limit, capturing the instant before the image itself dissolves.

So Urban fragments poetry in an alchemical process of destruction, reduction to its essence and the creation of a new cosmogony, then transfers this process to the image by simplifying it into essential lines that cancel out roles, powers, centrality and responsibility. The result is the final flash, the final illumination, the ultimate truth of the image of the world before it dissolves into the dark, into an absence of forms and lines. This act of courting and skirting the abyss of dissolution in a final flash of knowledge is the true vocation of poetic language, and the artist is able to perform the miracle of doubling up this gnoseological phenomenon in words and images: her images, like poetry, are full of life, with their own vital movement in the way that they push themselves to their ultimate limits. Like Urban’s images, poetry is always and by its own rules an epiphany of the truth of human time, a fleeting instant between the prenatal darkness and the darkness of death, a truth that appears to us as it dissolves, revealing that human substance is destined for dissolution. This is why Urban’s images are always desert-like, emptied, stripped bare, but at the same time very chromatically intense, explosive and compressed: laden with energy like gunpowder or a star about to explode. Like poetry, Urban’s images live and reveal the naked truth of vital energy and chromatic intensity, the atomic force of the vital nucleus (represented by the little, compressed spheres we mentioned earlier) caught between the void of the beginning and the void of dissolution.

sonia gentili, essayist and poet (winner of the 2016 Premio Viareggio)