Aquatic lyricism and politics in Barbara Gaile’s solo exhibition AQUA.WATER

​Barbara Gaile’s intentions show both modesty and ambition. The artist’s choice to paint and draw nothing but fragments of aquatic surfaces casts her latest exhibition in the light of disciplined serialism, where every subsequent image is a surprise in terms of nuance and a repetition in the larger scheme of things which has a single focus – water. Distinctiveness and recurrence are the artist’s rhythm, and she keeps it with perfect consistency. And yet, variance beats repetition in emotional impact, so the vibe is building excitement instead of serene withdrawal. The water changes colour, texture and mood, but through all that, the principle remains the same: the paintings (or drawings in the second half of the display) create an illusion of water. Blue, azure, grey or almost black, languidly flowing or whipped into a rippling frenzy by gusts of air, capped with swirling clouds of foam or “scraped” by the wind, entirely green, resembling a rough and glazed ceramic relief, satin-smooth and slumbering or torn to dazzling shreds by light and wind. The water’s image and the painting are an aesthetically delightful and plastic performance born from Gaile’s creative touch. The artist’s standout skill is to observe and notice, to understand, and, I dare say, to put into a system the subtlest nuances of aquatic motion. This time, the focus is on water, but Gaile explored the sky, pearl, metal, pigment and other substances in her earlier shows. What we are witnessing now is creative maturity at its peak. All the exhibits in Gaile’s AQUA.WATER in Art Station Dubulti are new artworks never displayed before.

​The water’s imagery is straightforward, so Gaile’s latest output can be called aesthetic landscape. Gaile treats water as a physical and biological matter that yields to idealisation and sets a certain mood. She uses a conceptual approach where water has become (if I may call it so) a screen reflecting the sky, the time of day and its state of light, the wind and an invisible realm of aquatic flora and fauna that gives the water its colour and plasticity. Water and all its atoms become a scenic image. At the same time, every scene is a moment in the viewer’s consciousness. But, having clicked with other scenes, it turns into a record of the consciousness’s changing history. Gaile’s distinctive approach is like a passive camera placed at the water’s edge, recording its every nuance for an extended time. This makes Gaile’s aquatic landscapes synthetic in that they show time at play and hold the sum total of drawn-out impressions. Although static in purely technical terms, her painting is charged with myriad moving pictures that come together to produce the end result. In this sense, the temporally synthetic impact of Gaile’s paintings is congenial with her painting technique – acrylic layers on canvas, multiple dozens, applied with a thin plastic plate to “build” the painting and meant to be perceived at once after a long and careful process of creation. The finishing touch is a powdered coating of iridescent pigment onto the painting’s surface. No wonder many viewers are aesthetically moved to cry: “Oh, what a perfect double!” Her painting has indeed soaked up all the fantastic qualities of water and makes for an incredibly believable illusion.

​The exhibition’s visual language is scenic, but the theme is broader and more profound. It is, in fact, contemporary. Gaile’s political question seems hidden behind recurring, abstract and aesthetic images of water. And yet, the key to unlocking the question is in the very fact of recurrence. Why water? And why repeat it again and again here and now? What broader contexts are pushing the artist to bring up the issue?

​The answer is in the implicit image of water in Gaile’s latest display: water is more than just a beautiful scene here, it is a resource. Water means life. No, its contamination and destruction due to harmful industrial practices and manmade climate change are not shown. But today, there is no way to see the recurrent images of water’s incredible beauty without a global and all-inclusive political context: the exhibition also shows water as a commodity. Heated, polluted and unfit for life, no longer able to self-clean. Water is up there among the world’s oldest material substances, and it remains the most essential liquid in our AI-inundated age. We all know water is a source of life, but what about its future? Who knows what that will one day be?

​According to Gilles Deleuze and his analysis of film images, the presence of water in the frame develops a “clairvoyant function” [function de voyance] in opposition to the “earthly vision” of everyday experience. “‘Objectivity’, equilibrium, justice are not of the earth: they are the preserve of water”. Such miraculous transition from abstract and aesthetic perception to social documentary and dramatic narrative in this exhibition is due to Gaile’s depiction of water. If the first exhibits appear mesmerising by virtue of water’s holistic and lyrical beauty, then the ensuing stirring and varied repetitions take the subject to a state of disintegration, like a delicate sheet of paper turned into ash. In other words, they take it to a traumatic crisis. At the end of this psycho-emotional journey, we have soaked up the situation to such a degree that we start hearing the questions Gaile is asking not only about water but also about ourselves.

Inga Šteimane, exhibition curator