Inner Temple
Robert Bernier, Parcours, Fall 2003
The most important temples are those that are found inside us. Who said that? It isn’t really important who, but understanding the meaning is. And that is what Andrea Blanar has been trying to do for the last fifteen years through her painting.
The meaning of the inner temple in question may reside in the power of the metaphor it suggests. Or does the usual meaning of the saying have to be reversed to be understood? That temples- which people of all ages and religions have built for the glory of their God(s)- are, in reality, symbols and metaphors of the temple inside us, and not the other way around? It is partly around this question that the pictorial approach of Andrea Blanar is woven. Of course, to condense the work of an artist as complete and complex as that of Blanar to a single consideration would be to take a wrong turn, since her initial reflections evoke a number of subtle nuances, to which are grafted a considerable number of complimentary pathways. More importantly, it must be said that the real link in this artist’s approach can be found in the meaning of the sacred, and in the echoes it evokes in us. Blanar explores this notion without any religious connotation, without integrating religion as any particular belief, but rather concentrating on an ensemble of beliefs, while questioning herself about the very act of believing itself. That is her primary subject: believing in its universal sense dimension. In the sense of the ‘Word’. If there inevitably has to be an end, then there also had to be a beginning! So what do we do with all this?
Andrea Blanar usually sets up the pictorial spaces in her canvasses by imposing a structure that resembles a window or a portal overlooking her landscapes. This construction becomes a symbol of passage from one world to another, the entranceway to the inner temple, the border between sacred and profane. From a strict pictorial point of view, paintings constructed in this way offer a harmonious blend of the rigors of form and the lightness of touch. Among her most striking works is a series constructed from materials that came from churches or sacred locations that have been marked by destruction. The passage of time leaves its traces. Here everything assumes even more meaning, adding another central preoccupation of the artist- the alternating destruction and construction (or reconstruction)- caused by wars, the passage of time, both in the exterior world and inside each and every one of us. Nothing is stable, everything keeps moving, and Blanar always sees the mark of the sacred in the ever increasing destruction and catastrophe around us, if only because of the extraordinary capacity of things to keep renewing themselves… perhaps the only concrete meaning we can give to eternity: nothing lost, nothing created.
Most extraordinary of all is that there are absolutely no givens in Andrea Blanar’s work. Nothing is the issue of some vague symbolism, nothing is disembodied. The artist moved her studio to an historic church in New Brunswick which she bought a few years ago, saving it from a sad end at the hand of a demolition ball, as if to emphasize the fact that somehow everything ends up coming together…