Audible Currents of Connectivity

Art South Africa, 2005. Clive Kellner

Kim Lieberman is a painter of seductive surfaces and evocative content. She shows a predilection for rich textures, strong colour or absent colour, and obsessively random, spontaneous marks and patterns – used primarily to convey meaning. Her works are spiritual or have spiritual dimensions. They are never meaningless, even if they possess no apparent story-telling narratives. They are always symbolic in intent, even when delighting in the mere glow and brightness of rich colour. The scintillating surfaces are boldly embroiled in patterns, in rich textural happenings that often tickle the viewer’s fancy and always reach out to the viewer’s attention.

There are just over a dozen works, in this, her first major US exhibition. They can be separated into abstract, e.g. ‘Auric Twine’, and figurative e.g. ‘Every Interaction’. The people who populate the white perforated stamp-paper seem to both embody a specific non-generic personality yet they also encompass the ‘everyman’ personified by the mother child or elderly figure type.

Lieberman’s latest works reflect on the connectivity between human beings, the ‘chi’ life force that exerts a continuous flow between people - influencing, attracting and producing a powerful effect. These currents are illustrated in works such as ‘Auric Twine’, ‘Current’ and ‘Influence’. They interweave the matrix of life between people in almost audible vibrating waves. These umbilical arms extend decoratively across the modernist grid of the paper support depicting an Asiatic quality in line and shape. ‘Influence’ by contrast to the rest of the works on exhibit is filled with a sea of whirling colours reminiscent of the pop artists and psychedelic record covers of the 60’s where the silhouetted figures are engulfed in colourful waves of emotion and life. The figures in this work are powerful generators and receptors for the electrical currents of colour that thread the characters into the field of the picture.

More subtle works like ‘Tree Circle’, ‘Thread Circle’ and ‘Random Connections’ play numeric games with their embedded symbolist language. What is seen and what is not. The quiet whiteness of absence - that which is not stated is as important or more important than that which is. What is left is the trace of presence, the passing of form. Lieberman’s is a minimalist language, hermeneutic and symbolic. The works are beautifully textured portraits of the oblique momentary aspects of life that we are all privy to. In ‘Current’ we see the connectedness of inter-human relations, the web of life that binds us together as delicate branches of threaded colour. Kim Lieberman’s latest works are a remarkable body of work. Beautifully constructed hand made objects that are articulate and precise. Woven narratives of symbolic gestures that tell their own stories.