Pure Emotion
Alma Rosa Jimenez
Director, Museo Universitario del Chopo
Sometimes we are given the chance to truly see specific aspects of the emotions we feel. This idle thirst for precision causes emotions to seem innumerable, perhaps because words alone don’t suffice to describe them. When we persevere in this serious search, many derivations and new possibilities emerge and, without really intending to, we begin to link one emotion or feeling to another, associating aspects of those emotions. Almost without intending to, we return to the point we started from. This is how we come come to understand that the emotions and feelings which we experience as human beings are in fact few. The wise person can save himself the pirouettes that this kind of intellectual exercise entails, but only if he succeeds in looking at a work of art of quality with receptivity and the innocence of a child. Claire Weissman Wilks’ work conveys these primal, intense and pure emotions. To enter, to allow oneself to be influenced by her paintings means an encounter with straightforward, though not simple emotions: Emotions that have lived inside men and women, that have lived throughout history and which may be identified with forceful words like pain, love, fear and aloneness. Claire Weissman Wilks is as self-possessed in her handling of colour, as she is refined in the expression of the feelings that radiate from her canvases. Her art moves away from intellectual positions and convoluted logical games and instead touches our mind and spirit through emotions that feel anew. The characters she creates are free of artifice and express a subtle energy, which, as we know, emanates from people, wraps itself around them. She avails herself of the human figure to express the suffering of the soul in solitude, the manifold ways in which a person meets the other and meets the world around her. She presents us with souls that melt in the tender embrace between lovers, weightless and etheral. This is an embrace that in its undulating dance speaks to the soul of the viewer, ever distracted, trying to define the gamut of the emotions he feels as he confronts a canvas that seems unable to contain that embrace.