All Art of the Fantastic requires the support of a detailed visual culture. Hieronimus Bosch’s heritage is still ever present. In Eli Tiunine’s art, classical myths and baroque delirium compete with contemporary psychology. Thus Christian hope rooted in the depths of Slavic mystique embraces Goya’s Lupercaliae, as well as the damned souls of the Sistine Chapel. “My tragic universe was born in the drama of Warsaw at war and its pervasive presence within my family. But I found my roots in France, in the world of psychoanalysis. This new perspective on the human being and the secrets he bears, comes from the same magic as does the world of childhood. As for the mythical universe, where man and the beast which is dormant deep inside each one of us, merge into one, there I draw from the tradition of the subconscious with which European history is so marvellously endowed.”
Exiled in France, Eli Tiunine deliberately, and with great determination, breaks with the art of the second half of the twentieth century. She adopts the techniques and subjects that the Avant-Garde repudiates. Refusing to abandon figurative paintings, as advocated by the official proponents of abstract art, she also remains detached from the main movements in French art. Equally, having fled from behind the Iron Curtain, separation from her native land emphasizes a feeling of solitude. “Central to the experience of the emigrant is the absence of a place one could call “home”. The experience of solitude is as ever present as it is fruitful. It is to this that I owe the emergence of my personal universe, far away from all that might be happening on the Polish artistic scene from which I felt excluded. Everywhere, yet nowhere – I stand on the border between psychoanalysis and the Slavic soul. This is a new perspective for me of course, since I lived under a dictatorship of the masses for nineteen years. So I always find myself between Jung and Gombrowicz, between two visions of the world, both so true, so sensitive, sometimes so near and at the same time, irreconcilable. It was essential for me to reconcile them, to merge them into one.”
EPIPHANY
In traditional iconography, the Adoration of the Magi is a court ceremonial whose scenography is inspired by feudal homage. Rogier van der Weiden changes this treatment. At the feet of the Christ Child he depicts the three ages of life. Under the pretext of the presents offered by the Magi, gold, frankincense and myrrh, he has the potentates of the three old continents kneel down. A hoary old man pays homage in the name of Europe. With yellow complexion and slanting eyes, an Asian man in a turban precedes a magnificent ephebe, who, as the first, presents the allegiance of black Africa to the Galilean.
For Eli Tiunine, Epiphany is the prefiguration of Calvary. The courtly world is shaken by the pain of childbirth, beneath the merciless stare of the witnesses to the drama. Summoned to the great census, Joseph and Mary are not dressed in homespun and flaxen clothes, but rather in coats of thorns, stuck in their flesh. The Virgin, her face drained of blood, is consumed by the sufferings of labour. Looking at the future of a world forming before their very eyes, are the three kings, iron helmeted; the angels have summoned them to the sound of brass horns and silver buccinae. Voyeurs hiding in the shadows, they are blood-red or fire-red. All three wear purple and the colours of mourning.
For fear of falling into the ostentation of princely processions, the need for authenticity risked making this depiction of Epiphany slide into voyeurism. Eli Tiunine searches in the depths of her heart for a fresh insight, which will efface her inner self. Detached from any cultural allusions, she gives once more to the mystery of the Incarnation the terrible anguish which can engender the metamorphosis of gods. Her feminine intuition places the Christ Child in the Virgin’s hair, indistinguishable from the Magi’s star.
CRUCIFIXION
At first sight, Eli Tiunine’s triptych merely condenses the religious narrative depicted in the Isenheim triptych painted five centuries ago by the sublime Matthias Gottard Nithard (Grünewald). As in the Unterlinden Museum (Colmar, France), a sky, laden with sulphur fumes, hangs over Christ, who, between the two thieves, is in the throes of death. Two of the Holy Women minister to the crucified: his mother Mary, frozen in sorrow and the sinner, Mary Magdalene, consumed by passionate love.
To the right of Jesus, the Good Thief confronts his destiny. His tranquil expression accepts the promise of Christ: “Today you will be with me in Paradise”. On his left, the Bad Thief, howling at Heaven’s face, writhes in revolt. There are discreet allusions to the five wounds of Christ: a barely incised flank, palms pierced by the needles and ankles marked by arrow wounds, but no drop of blood stains these wounds. Do the three faces of Christ represent his divinity but also the Good and the Bad Thief? Or, should we rather consider these three faces as successive moments in time, joined in a continuous movement by the words of the Son to the Father? The raised profile suggests distress: “Father, if you will, take this cup of suffering away from me”. The next face is turned in resignation towards the earth: “Let what has been written come to pass”. The third portrait faces us with the acceptance of inevitable death: “It is finished”.
Frozen in sorrow, the Virgin of compassion gives shelter to humanity; the good men who join hands in communion with the repentant thief. “Yes, it is for you to gather together good men”, the Magdalene seems to say her, accusingly, “but what of the sin which envelops me in red? I have to forge a shield with my two hands”. Climbing up the wood of the Cross, evil beings assail her. Depicted with bestial claws and rapacious talons, they slither up to her shoulders. This Holy Woman shelters all these demonic beings in her hair. Rising from Purgatory, the unbaptized dead clutch at the Cross. And thus, suffering follows in the path of divine royalty.
This eruption of dream and subconsciousness follows the tradition of fourteenth century German sculpture. The faces of the Devout Christ in Perpignan and in Halter are shot through with the same dramatic intensity. This wild excess of bodies transforms arms and legs into a conglomeration of filaments and branchiae, in which superimposed images fade one into the other.
The study of pain, which finds its culminating point in the Isenheim triptych, gives a focal point to the creation of Eli Tiunine. The same tetanized limbs, the same distorted fingers, the same tragic faces: the Aids epidemic echoes the Great Plague. Yet the confrontation turns into paradox: Eli Tiunine’s figures occupy a different place within religious iconography. Her art neither evokes the expiatory suffering of the fourteenth century flagellants, nor assumes the ulcers of the contemporary world. The artist succeeds in detaching herself from her emotions in order to rediscover her soul. Instead of compassion, there is lasting sorrow. Her biblical characters suffer and love above and beyond earthly creatures. However, these heroes of modernity are anointed in no place and by no religion.
PIETA
Eli Tiunine first fixes her conception on the three essential axes derived from the position of the dead body. Faithful to tradition, she makes the wood of the Cross the centre of all contradictions. The rigidity of the upright lines accentuates the static order which gravitational weight asserts. The inert body slides into a neutralizing symmetry. But influenced by different forces, what had belonged to continuity is accomplished through rhythm. Passing through different states – stretched, interlaced or stiffened – rigid matter becomes flexible. Passing from a softened, malleable state, it decomposes.
The need for compassion, a sort of moral warmth, accentuates the extension and multiplicity of symbols. Instead of seeing simply a Descent from the Cross, one sees a taking in charge of the whole of crucified humanity. In contrast to the horizontal lines of the prone bodies, the artist strengthens the vertical lines of the Virgin. Immediately, emotional forces are freed, softening the constraining rigour of the composition. Playing upon affective and symbolic meanings, active energy upsets the comatose solidity of the horizontal planes, as it infuses the inertia of death with new life.
Decomposed matter combines with the liberation of energy. Thus the painting substitutes the manipulation of ideas through reason, for that of dreams through myths.
In the meeting of opposites, reason would suggest that there are differences among men. The symbolic way of thinking plays on the differences in matter. The artist tames the blackness of devilish hatred, by contrasting it to the light of love. The mixture of warm and cool tones facilitates the coexistence of extremes. A variety of binding medium, oil paint and egg-based tempera, allow her to veil with light the faces against seen he black night.
THE CROSSING OF THE STYX
To wrench himself free from the stream which pulls him toward the void, Charon, bent over his oar, struggles against the propulsive force. Between the luminous bank of the living, and the black bank where Cerberus, guardian of Hell, watches, Charon forces his way through. The black, abstract, formless silhouette reveals an anxious face. The whole art of Tiunine consists in using what appears in the physical world to illustrate the moral world. Is Charon the oarsman rowing his boat, or is he the fairground entertainer fastening the skiff of the merry-go-round, prefiguring the eternal cycle? Does the passage of the Styx mark the crossing of the River of Forgetfulness, or the arrow of Sagittarius, bending his bow to let fly its weapon towards the sphere, changed by an eclipse into a ring of gold?
On this intellectual journey, marked by the symbolic, a number is always full of meaning. At the edge of the shadowy abyss, eight tense faces: eight, the number of men on a chessboard. Eight beings waiting for a common fate: Death. Of the three women, only the youngest one throws a backward, nostalgic glace at the pleasures she must leave. Stoicism, indifference or terror, are the masks of men facing death. Turned towards death, the noble savage with frizzy hair endures the laws of nature. The old man, whom death has forgotten, turns his blind eyes inwards. Passions or remorse leave eyes sunken and gives the form of a wolf’s muzzle to the damned soul whom the Furies already pursue. In the middle of the waiting crowd, in radiant whiteness, a mother with pale knees, knees down at the edge of time.
The drama is played out without bodies. Only joined hands form a protection shield. Knotty fingers, like vine-shoots, represent a blood wedding. Tiunine harmonizes the movements of the psyche with outside events, thus embodying the concept of the unity of reality which Jung calls “unus mundus”. The woman, in hope of the future, remains subjected to instinct, bound by a real cord to the beast of prey hidden behind her. A tragic and nietzschean image of woman: to this mother Eli Tiunine gives a body, its fate to be lived out in the pain of childbirth. Women, mistresses of life and death, in connivance with misfortune and misery, let the damned souls of the earth sleep in the perfume of their hair. Facing black death, the power of life shines clear and bright.
THE SHADOW AND THE LIGHT
Any title is an appeal to recognition. Is “The Shadow and the Light” the contrast offered by Eli Tiunine, appropriate as a title to illuminate this enchanted forest? The interlacing of gestures and words triggers off a brightly coloured procession of idols. The sacred terror, which they inspire, invades the psyche. The creative will of all embracing painting, rustling with the noise of presences riding in the wind, borrows from Nietzsche his magic of the extreme. Not being weighed down by cultural allusion, the picture changes into a vibrant expanse. In this tumultuous background, coming from the depth of the Divine, the observant will recognise the Holy Spirit.
In the chinks of this theatre, two caverns open up. There, Shadow and Light lay down their disguises. Myth, freed from the aridity of classical education, dares to betray the gods of the classical pantheon. The power of defunct religions, vast mythologies branching out from the words “Shadow” and “Light”, has invaded the painting. Messengers of heterogeneous tribes, with unpronounceable names (as those one can read on immigrants’ front doors), come in search of a site. Time, in its passing, has set down its royal heirs on banks formerly occupied by the classical divinities.
An unmoving point, in the center of the whirlwind, two women’s figures come to warn of the presence of the gods. Quivering, twinkling, divine matter crystallizes the reflection of the mirrors of water, enfolding these nymphs in pure light. But at once we enter the perverse game of exchanged roles. The Immortals have changed to face of Shadow, which they have wrapped in light. If the protagonists were to change roles, would mortals have the courage to reject the reality of different worlds? True innovation brooks no social constraint. What we see in is parody. This thin film, which envelopes everything, is the mark of modernity: rather than to ensnare, to become light and shadow. Priestesses of a cult to both Hades and Dionysius, the two Kora enthrone Women, become sovereign.
THE APOCALYPSE: THE BREAKING OF THE FIRST FOUR SEALS
Sounding Uriel’s air in Mozart’s Requiem, Eli Tiunine breaks open the first four seals of her Apocalypse: “Tuba mirum spargens sonum”. From the side of the horizon the fiery silhouette of the angel comes to set the sea aflame, and his resonant trumpet penetrates like a spear into the living flesh of humanity. The visionary of Patmos makes the four horsemen appear in response to the call of the living, symbolized by the fixed sign of the Zodiac: Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. The horses, which carry man in all his wars, were, according to mythology, a gift of Poseidon-Neptune, god of the sea. Wishing to renew this iconography, Tiunine transmutes the liquid element into energy. Thus she manages to invert the traditional laws, which govern the fight between water and fire. The angel, flooding the earth under a deluge of flames, receives the support of the four sub-elements of primeval waters. Liberated by the breaking open of the first four seals, the horses’ breath scratches the painting with slanting lines, furthering the destruction begun by the angel’s trumpet.
“Maledictis”. Out of the first wound that Neptune’s trident inflicts on Earth, rises the first horse. Eli Tiunine paints it ochre and blowing an icy breath. Death, with empty eyes sockets, bestrides this horse, and renders Earth pale. Under her yellowish veil and her straw-coloured hair, the hideous creature exhales a greenish breath. Her pike, or rather, her sting, strikes blindly at embryonic beings, all willing victims.
“Supra dictis”. Areion was born from the rape of Demeter. Hurled out from the mouth of the black stallion, a long jet of steam crosses the fiery sky. Fire of fire: in order that men should cut each other’s throats, a great sword was given to him. Crowned with flames, his mission to destroy peace on Earth, the angel of Mars, the red planet, appears, exalted in Leo. The warrior receives, in the place of the sword, a trident, with which he transpierces bodies. Thus raped, the Earth becomes sterile.
“Voca me cum benedictis”. From Medusa’s blood will be born Pegasus, the winged horse. The blue horseman of Scorpio, the king of the waters, rides it. Saint John puts in his hand the scale of judgement, so he will know how to recognize the sublime, so often mixed with egoism. From the monster, which freezes the blood, Tiunine keeps hatred, fate’s instrument of destiny, who turns to good account the ensuing confusion. The tragic heroes, eager to kill each other, seize the spear of the angel, the better to satiate their need for vengeance. But as well as barley, which must perish, there is sweet oil, which can be saved. Made of flesh and blood, compassion asks for grace. Love, able to uproot human beings from Earth, transports the couple to Heaven, where they find forgetfulness in the harmony of all their senses.
When he opened the fourth seal,(...) there appeared a pale horse. He, who mounted him was Death, and the underworld of the dead accompanied him”. The devastating power of the fourth rider is inherent in the potential of the three others. Tiunine has avoided using images of the sword, famine and mortality. She keeps only the vision of savage beasts. The black and yellow stripes of the tiger accentuate the ferociousness of this wild animal, and the mission he is to accomplish. The faceless rider “Death” has stuck a bronze mask where a face should be. From the helmet a luxurious head of hair escapes. Air, blowing on fire, could not become Death’s ally, or could not extinguish the fire, because in the sign of Aquarius, the Angel of Moderation announces the possibility of regeneration.
According to medieval tradition, the degrees of hierarchy can be read in the scale measuring the earthly importance of the victims. Insignificant, or resigned, the innocent seem to anticipate the decrees of the Angel of Justice. Struck by the first Rider, they escape in death; thus the sufferings of malediction remain unknown to them. The second rider, his helmet enveloped in red flames, sees his destructive powers enhanced by the fists of the hate-filled, clinging to his spear. The lovers of life try to stop the arm of the third dispenser of justice. At the furthest end of the scale are placed the mighty. They had power and control over the world; they will have all of time to savour their long descent into nothingness. Given to the tiger! Savage they were, by savagery they will perish.
THE SUMPTUOUS OUTPOURING OF THE SLAVIC SOUL
Even though the world of Eli Tiunine is still susceptible to profound change, it already seems possible to foresee the direction it will take. In her solitude, the artist has elaborated an unquestionably personal universe, which owes nothing to the surrealism of painters such as Magritte or Dali. The heap of intertwined characters, combined with an obvious horror of the void, would connect it more to “Art Brut”, if the ever-present cultural substratum were not so influential. In spite of exile, this profuse creativity, typical of the Slavic soul, emerges from the historical context of Poland before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rather than a direct link with the visionary art of her country, our artist, in her introductory comments, acknowledges her sources to be found as much in her childhood as in the writings of Gombrowicz, Warsaw’s eminent philosopher.
The best artists in Poland were, from the Fifties, joined under the banner of a revolution where scope would one day catch off guard the supporters of official art. Beksinski imposed his hallucinatory studies of architectures on a viscerally tragic universe; Setowski stripes with flashes, the greenish depths where indefinable sea creatures float; Prolop places his disturbing bestiary in an apparently banal world, and Siudmak opens his outer space to the gods of the future. Each, in his own tragic vision, introduces the new methods of perception and reasoning that were first begun by Surrealism.
Eli Tiunine knows, better that any of them, the resources provided by the esoteric. Her intellectual quest could be considered sterile if her heart did not impose its law on each of her creations. Thus the allusions she makes remain subordinate to an intuitive vision of natural forces. The powers of life and death appear as a deliverance from destiny. To restore, to re-infuse the body with desire, to evoke ever-present and inherent forces. A painting has no justification for being, unless it reveals the Essence, the intrinsic nature of all that is. Painting has no other function but to describe a personal relationship with interior divinity. Painter, woman, wife and mother, Eli Tiunine, in each of her works, gives Eloa, the Angel of Mercy, the responsibility of bringing clarity, forgiveness and sensivity. Reconciler of the orders and degrees of the Infernal divinities, compassion illuminates her tragic view of the human condition.
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