Elisabeth/Liz Agostini

Layers of the soul - layers of consciousness - layers of overlapping materials, interwoven in transcendent - relentless search of the essential: the works of Liz Agostini.

Art as the fruit of ability versus art as lore and embodiment of the knowledge of hidden realities, suffered without comfortable circumvention. These works are void of such contrapositions.
Colours - in terms of colourfulness - are mostly used sparingly and avoid exteriorized inebriation. This induces the viewer to enter into a state of heightened associative attention and does not negate the artist’s ponderings and grapplings and concernment in resolving the themes which impose themselves upon her or which she challenges herself with.

Beyond provocative Zeitgeist or blatant sensationalism, Elisabeth Agostini explores multi-layeredness for solutions. The elemental is conveyed very tangibly, which explains her works’ strong, static vibrancy. They hold information and instructions, but also open questions, equally multi-layered as their physical structure.

The viewer is impressed equally by past and future, often assisted by the materials used.
The flow of forms over nearly dematerialized-looking handmade paper from Nepal, over cardboard, canvas or panel, often seems to be guided by a delicate chiselling with which the artist insightfully describes the inner worlds she has regarded, or leaves them veiled in subtle symbolism. Here and there, the contours lose themselves under a rough glimmer of quartz sand suggestive of the third dimension.

Elisabeth Agostini distills traces of experience as visual vibrations from her communications with her inner self, with her surroundings and with the artistic “tools” she makes use of. Vibrations that are not captured and intensified as a single occurrence, but rather are brought into the context of a harmonious perceptive visualization that in turn is created solely by means of personal experience - ultimately the artist’s encompassing stand-point.

For centuries, philosophies and religions have been teaching us that not only our doings, but also out thoughts, emotions and visions have effects upon our surroundings, and even upon the whole world. Further, that nothing we have ever done, thought or felt is lost, but is rather always present and retrievable – somewhere in the cosmos. And even further: that sooner or later we will reap what we sow. That no energy is ever lost.

For a long time, C.G. Jung, Rupert Sheldrake, Vera F. Birkenbihl and many others have been occupying themselves with the insights from studies on morphic fields. These fields encompass and connect the diverse parts of the system they organize, force an order upon it; a web of Knowing envelops our Earth.

The great psychoanalyst C.G. Jung labels the morphogenetic field as „collective memory“ or the „collective unconscious“:

„Memory is a repository of thoughts. Naturally, the form-creating field is a field of thought repositories, or more simply, a thought field. These fields are scientifically acknowledged, their significance for the species undisputed. They are not to be explained in terms of matter, but the other way around:

To explain matter, one resorts to terms such as „energy“ and „field“. It is simply a matter of the enigmatic processes involved in the forming of crystals and plants, animals and humans, even human society and culture. Are these the thoughts of the universal mind?“

It is nearly impossible to adequately delineate something so inapprehensible in thoughts, let less in language. But the notion of the thought field approximates conceptions which we can grasp, since our own mind is also a „repository“ of all our thoughts.

Likewise, in „her morphic fields“ Elisabeth Agostini works through her own emotional memory and thus seeks to depict the ungraspable in painting. „While maintaining control by distancing herself from the picture“, (Ingrid Jureit) she works through layers of the soul – layers of consciousness – layers of overlapping materials, always with the intent of preserving her emotional world as an experience of reality throughout the picture's many levels.