Ena Swansea

For the last few months I’ve been working on an exceptional, odd, outsized and kind of unique project.
It’s an extended contemplation on two fields: the ritual and culture of bullfighting and opera brought together, via my own hot-house flower kind of approach.
The inspiration and the site for these projects is the antique and notable Roman arena of Arles, France. It was built in about 1 B.C and has now been magnificently restored. It holds 25,000 people.
The project will unfold in two parts. For the first event in September, I am honored to be the only American artist ever selected to create the “Goyesque,” a giant sand painting covering the entire floor of the arena, roughly the scale of a football field. For one day, this ancient arena becomes my canvas for a monumental and site specific painting, that will be executed overnight, unveiled in the morning, and dissipate by afternoon.
In the tradition of ‘Corrida Goyesque,’ named in honor of Francisco Goya, starting at 5 pm, step by step, vuelta after vuelta, the slow but sure annihilation of my sand painting will be enacted under the ephemeral choreography created by matadors and bulls. By 8 pm the painting will be no more.
At the other end of the arena, there will be an orchestra and 200-person choir, performing a section of the opera Carmen, before the bullfight begins.
Since childhood, this culture has occupied my imagination and created a desire to think about its mystery, through images. Bullfighting remains enigmatic, and even has shown itself to be more so, during the past year as I made a continual study about this ritual. First there is the feeling that one can never know the bull. He has charged throughout history, alone or mythically saddled with a man’s body from the neck down, (as Picasso imagined himself, the magnetically irresistible Minotaur, etc) and the legs of a domesticated servant. During the faena, the last part of the bullfight, we most poetically see two figures tightly entwined, before the touch of death.
“Young men dream of wrapping the bull around their waist.” - Garcia Lorca

This project searches for a place in contemporary art where the ancient art of corrida is alive and in the world today.
Part 2 of my work in this site will occur in June, 2011 and will be installed in the 60 upper arches of the same arena.
Here I hope to address the architecture of this building itself, ornamenting it, as the Romans did. Just as my painterly action will remain only fleetingly as a fixed composition until the dramatic and unpredictable corrida takes the stage, the activity of the city surrounding these arches has changed dramatically over the course of many centuries in time. Long ago the requisite Roman statues that stood in these upper arches were knocked out, and now, the newly glowing stone has been restored and readied to support art, just as it did when it was first built. Thus, I will install a series of character personifications, echoing the missing statues, to dramatically revive a classic narrative that also originates from this setting.
Based on Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, which concludes with Carmen’s death in front of a bullfighting arena, my version for Arles will star the actress Isabelle Huppert as Carmen. In June I produced the initial photo shoot for this project in Paris.
The piece can be revealed through the 60 arches in contemporary cinematographic time, as 60 frames of film. It asks for comparison to Roman temple friezes, where the action unfolds in chopped up moments, perhaps repeating an action, perhaps moving forward in the jumping progression of Proust's magic lantern.
This installation is a meditation on the opera, converted into contemporary art. In a way it is Carmen without music. But there will be some music. As part of the project, renowned Flamenco guitarist and composer Gregorio Ibor-Sanchez will write a transposed Carmen, allowing the story to reassert itself with a very different, Gypsy musical foundation. This special contribution to the Arles project will be performed at the opening in June 2011. - Ena Swansea

PSYCHO – ENA SWANSEA & ROBERT LUCANDER, exhibition view at Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg, 2011

OPENING: FRIDAY, 16 December 2011 at 7 pm
DURATION: 18 December 2011 to 25 March 2012
The Sammlung Falckenberg will bring together US painter Ena Swansea and works by Finnish artist Robert Lucander who now lives in Berlin.
For further enquiries about Ena Swansea please contact info@arndtberlin.com and also visit the website www.sammlung-falckenberg.de

PSYCHO – ENA SWANSEA & ROBERT LUCANDER, exhibition view at Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg, 2011