“the matter vibrates with attention, vibrates with process, vibrates with inherent present time.”
Clarice Lispector
“If men could see what lies beneath that pretty face, those sumptuous lips, and sultry eyes, they’d scramble away filled with terror…” With this description, ancient mystics and religious leaders would disqualify these alluring physical attributes, because there is nothing more dangerous than to be tempted by beauty. For them, physical beauty hides a putrid nature with the power to lead the most intellectual souls astray.
The essay “Face and Soul,” by Doctor Francisco González Crussi, launches one of the many attacks against beauty by arguing “anatomical reductionism.” It asserts that by centering your attention to certain features and reducing them to simple components, then physical beauty is nothing but “blood, veins, arteries, bile, viscous liquids, sticky humors, and raw meat.”
What is it about these small features that are beautiful and stand above the rest? It is this question that baffles the North American painter, Jen Mazza, and her art seeks to answer this conundrum.
She poses as the model in many of her paintings. These are a photographic snapshot of her experiences and memories. There is a realistic quality to them that reminds the viewer that we are in a perpetual state of transformation and change. Her project Scarlett Intent and Other Series integrates seductive images that are harmonious and even vivacious in their composition. The fingers gently graze the lips, and these are slightly open as if they’re about to passionately devour the object of their desire.
Mazza studied in Mary Washington College. Her work has been exhibited across the United States, in places such as New York City and New Jersey. She was selected to participate in the Emerge program from the Aljira Center For Contemporary Art and her work has been profiled by The New York Times and The Star-Ledger.
“The process of creating the paintings is also a dialogue with form and ideas. Though the finished images are representational, the paintings remain “open,” literally blank, through a great deal of the process. Each image begins as a near abstraction; the book is reduced to its rectangular form placed so as to be somewhat antagonistic to its support (not unlike Malevich’s “White on White”) with images and text only appearing later in the process. The supports themselves (the stretched canvases) are often subtly rough around the edges, or just slightly askew, allowing for the objectness of the canvas to both support and undermine the illusion of the objectness of the book.”
Socrates spoke of beauty as a brief tyranny, and Plato swiftly sidestepped the argument by saying beauty was nature’s privilege. Jen Mazza fearlessly jumps into the fray to unravel the concepts of beauty, and she appropriates the body as if it were a puzzle that must be put back together, but ultimately there are cracks and empty spaces that cannot be filled. Remaining truthful to her own artistic process, she hopes that by recording the ephemeral she will capture an “unseen, unrealized truth floating nebulous in the air.” She marks a moment in time without judgment, and it is only afterwards that she has knowledge of its importance. She calls it both a scientific and reflexive process and the simplicity of her visual language embodies that simple, unwavering question: “What is beauty?” As such, her work holds much more truth and sincerity than an assertive reply of its definition or constructs.
See more of her work here.
