Catalina Chervin: Catharsis

 Drifting closer toward abstraction, her compositions began to evince a sketchy, spontaneous quality that produced compelling tensions with areas of painstaking detail. Despite these new formal occurrences, Chervin did not fully abandon her twisted, humanoid forms, nor did she relinquish the themes of existential struggle central to her earlier works. Indeed, the artist’s more recent drawings demonstrate her continued preoccupation with beginnings, endings, and hauntings, as well as psychological and physical tensions. 

Chervin’s drawings from the late 1980s and early 1990s contain surreal, chaotic scenes that evoke origin myths; her compositions gesture toward cataclysmic events that prompt the suffering of both humanity and the spirit world. This imagery is at once universal and highly personal: Chervin is the descendant of Russian Jews who immigrated to Argentina - uprooting their lives to escape the Holocaust. Chervin herself endured the oppression and violence of Argentina’s civic-military dictatorship. The visual lexicon that Chervin developed within her early works seems to draw from these histories of trauma and distress to create emotionally charged, symbolic narratives around human mortality. 

The formal shifts that occurred in Chervin’s drawings after 2000 can be found in her prints, as well. The artist’s mark making—both meticulous and fluid—produces a new kind of density, and shadows seems to emerge as presences, rather than voids. Her prints often invoke higher powers and dark forces that coalesce, dissolve, and drift— shifting populations and landscapes around them as they rise and fall. Chervin has also created “portfolios” from specific groups of prints: Apocalypsis (2004), Canto (2010-2011), and IT (2015). These portfolios combine the artist’s etchings with the poetry and writings of Fernando Arrabal, Itzhak Katzenelson, and Clarice Lispector. In this context, Chervin’s prints transcend the realm of visual art to become texts—pages in a larger narrative—weaving through, expanding, and illuminating the written language with which they are juxtaposed.

While Chervin’s oeuvre primarily comprises drawings and prints, she has also created a number of large-scale collage works. This medium is a logical, rich extension of her drawing and printmaking practices; collage allows Chervin to deepen the physicality inherent in her work. Employing etching techniques to excavate printing plates or erasing with such force that paper supports disintegrate, her surfaces often possess a geological quality. In Chervin’s collaged works, the heightened contrasts between smooth and rough, uniform and heterogeneous, endow each composition with a sculptural quality. The tactility of these works recalls the layered notices and advertisements found on the walls of urban settings. Here, however, the message is transcendent— rather than diverting our attention to commodities or entertainment, we are redirected inward. Chervin encourages us to seek our own answers in the protrusions and shadows of her mysterious, ambiguous spaces.