About a “Collagera”
By Abram Bravo Guerra
Jennifer Ancizar’s work starts from and is sustained by the essential link with the urgencies of design and illustration. It would be an imprudent act to omit this reality, as well as an unforgivable discredit to the creative capacities that this branch allows. Because, although at this point Ancizar has assembled a solid artistic body, the referential and direct scale of design was the primary object to pave the way. A transit that starts by responding to the commission with the appropriate dose of ingenuity and originality, to generate a visual patent that puts at its service any content. A patent that has found in digital collage a fertile and complex space to (de)encrypt ideas and unbridle the progressive dose of her own text. Jennifer is as much an artist, as a designer, as a collagera –this is what her Instagram profile suggests-, wrapped in the intertwined possibilities of those three paths. But we are talking about a young and slowly formulated work, the result of circumstances and proximities that, logically, must be taken into account.
Ancizar was born in Havana, Lawtonian as she defined herself in one of our conversations. Although her direct incursion into the world of visual arts would come well into adulthood, she had the necessary dose of culture as a companion at an early age, dabbling in various turns of the artistic field –with special affection for music-. Her unfinished studies in philology were, at the time, a suitable vehicle for acquiring tools that would bring her closer to heritage and, gradually, to the creation of a sustainable universe of timeless references and substantial visual variety. The icing on the cake comes to be the two-handed work with her husband, Mayo Bous, who inserts her in the creative action of design: first in suggestions, then in the management of different areas of the artistic product, and then jumping into creative freedom in equal parts. There, in a brainstorming session, she came up with the intention of collage for a collective animation project and, from the collective, she went on to define her visual route.
Already at this point, Jennifer possesses the clarity necessary to put a congruent visual system to work, all combined in the referential multiplicity acquired over time, the communicative acuity of the designer and, above all, the innate sensitivity of the one who needs to create in order to express himself. From these three ingredients she begins to compose her digital collages, rummaging through extensive galleries in the public domain to execute nominally disparate dialogues that cleverly connect history, heritage and reality. Because she scrambles a universe of past references and updates them in the combination of turn, generating a suggestive transversal text that bifurcates and enriches in the possibilities of each separate element. In this sense, nineteenth-century references gravitate, almost always feminine (daguerreotypes, nods to late romanticism or rococo) enriched in the commercial visuality of twentieth-century Cuba, all in tugging with the pop imaginary of the 2000s and with a certain tendency toward more urban, more trending visuals. Logically, this cocktail of possibilities ends up influencing the spectator in multiple ways, reorganizing and constructing the text according to all these alterable factors. Broadly speaking, Ancizar has known how to take advantage of the possibilities of pastiche to build variegated realities treated with extreme delicacy.
And, of course, an ingenious pastiche becomes an essential resource when it comes to digital collage. The access rates to images are enormous nowadays, which extralimits the possibilities and, at the same time, multiplies the challenge of associating disparate visualities in a suitable symbolic terrain. Certainty is becoming a problem in the age of (over)information. Precisely, Jennifer Ancizar’s collage proposal is extremely careful in the selection of the adequate symbolic pattern: not only does she renounce to chance as a possibility, but the care in the choice, positioning and treatment of each image is an artist’s hallmark. Whatever the senses, the narrative is composed in progressive and interconnected readings that thread the totality of the scene; an expanded discourse is directed with precision in the dialogue organized by each element. The composition, then, safely directs and amplifies the communicational resource by playing, deliberately, with the possibilities of the symbol, cleverly rattling the pastiche.
For example, the triptych of La razón, el diseño y el arte (Reason, Design and Art) replaces the female figure with burly men in the purest style of Jaques Louis David. Men who move between symbolic scenes, dialoguing with allegorical elements –brain, mouth, heart- in a relational function with each independent fragment of the triptych. From each scene sprout flowers in pastel tones, half deco or half noveau, to close Ancizar’s intentionally ironic visual seal. The cuts are limited to splicing what is necessary to organize differences that are not very strident, and the postproduction collaborates in the general and homogeneous patina. A brief repair ends up reproducing the mechanics repeated in each work: the poetry emerges in the patchwork and, from its own symbolic action, the discreet discourse that the artist weaves together emerges. And once again the ingenious pastiche, treated with the necessary delicacy and sharpness to enhance the philosophical-communicative tools of the times.
In the midst of her own evolution, Jennifer Ancizar’s work follows paths that solidify her presence in the insular creative context. It stands out for the precision with which it interweaves manifestations and, above all, for its interesting defense of two media sometimes relegated by the most snobbish: collage and digital space. Jennifer is an unhealthy quotationist, a collector of memories, a misplaced specialist of pastiche, and her ironic portrait of realities is contagious to more than one. She is a collagera, an image mender and –why not- an inventor of dreams, she has been able to give the high note of her abilities and to build, without noise, her own personal route.