MARGARITA WEINER
Now On Tour
On view October 26 through December 28, 2024
Margarita Weiner (b. December 26, 1935 Douglas AZ, d. July 16, 2024 Arcadia, CA) began painting in 1969 when she was thirty-three years old. Upon moving to Arcadia from Upland California she joined Arcadia’s Newcomers Club and soon went on a plein-air painting field trip. Painting a couple trees on canvas board on a sunny day, blue sky with white cumulus clouds, she veritably never put down the paint brush again. Lazily or addicted or driven by passion and discipline and with nothing else to do but raise two kids (!) - however one might try to define her motivation - Margarita Weiner always painted and therethrough created a world of the mind: representational, abstract, surreal, micro- and macrocosmic, flowing and organic, hard edged and speculative, ruminative and philosophical, maximal and, finally, minimal.
Now On Tour is so titled because the twenty-nine paintings and one drawing (her last artwork) in the exhibition can be seen as Weiner’s meditation on and expression of a grand transitional moment and movement into and throughout unknown space and dimension following earthly life, informed by her personal experiences and sensations and told by way of a casually reduced, simplified and elemental visual language: one of directional flows; basic geometries; expressive transparencies; restrained, original and alluring colorations, and a deceptively uncomplicated offering of singular forms which turn out to be polysemous and highly complex. These seemingly easy paintings leave an impression and take up residency in the contextually variable recesses of the beholder’s imagination. They speak with clarity and mystery about the world we inhabit and about the universe we experience as a quasi-finite human-type organ against and in through which the universe pushes and then exits and deflects, transformed.
Margarita Weiner’s paintings lay bare the basic structural elements of their own making. Here are lines and stripes, here are extensions of color, here is a certain shape and there, another. Taken singly, they are minimal and seductive to the eye; simple and beautiful with exhilarating tactility. Taken together, they are deeply meditative, equipoised, assuring, life and death affirming, longing and satisfied, wondering and knowing, final and beginning.
The paintings comprising Now On Tour were painted from 2021 to June, 2024. In early July of this year Weiner made a small color pencil drawing of two short lengths of palm tree trunk. She died days later, on July 16. All artworks in the exhibition were painted during the full phase-range of her dementia - from the beginnings of identifiable forgetfulness and verbal repetition through to the profoundest levels of her disease - when the brain can no longer remember how to manage the body’s continuation. To my mind and understanding within the field of visual arts, and with intimate knowledge about this artist’s history and her process of art making, the fact of her dementia is a footnote in the far greater story of her painting and this incredible body of work. If there is anything truly substantive to be said of the impact Alzheimer’s Disease had on the artworks on display in Now On Tour, it is that Margarita Weiner intuitively harnessed the pathology of forgetfulness to release unnecessary complexity and overdeveloped ideation, and thereby arrived at a far more pure and essential endpoint in conveying the meaning behind her creative activity.
BUEN PROVECHO
