Art: The Two Eves by Marthe Aponte
Beauty under the Skin
The artwork of Marthe Aponte by Toti O’Brien
Artist Marthe Aponte creates magical work in “picoté,” a rare and old technique, dating back to the thirteenth century, which allows all sorts of designs by means of small holes pierced on paper.
Marthe Aponte—Mother Durga—Picoté—2016—Courtesy of the Artist
Toti O’Brien. Do you pierce only the back of the paper, as it was most commonly done?
Marthe Aponte. I am constantly flipping the paper from one side to the other, piercing it on both sides to get different textures. When I pierce the front I get flat-edged holes, but when I pierce the back I get lifted edges. I am interested in creating contrast between the two types of holes, visually separating them in order to obtain subtle rhythms. My whole work implies great care for details, and is under the sign of subtlety.
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Because of its delicate tridimensional quality, “picoté” engages the sense of touch, like embroidery. The two forms have in common as well the fine pixilation of the surface, and they are almost indistinguishable from a distance.
Like embroidery, lacing, crochet, all the so-called feminine arts, “picoté” involves long hours of meticulous patience while repeating a same tiny gesture. Choosing this technique, for Aponte, is a way of joining the lineage of women doing anonymous needlework throughout the centuries, in the silence of the home or the nunnery.
The main themes of Aponte’s production (very abundant, in spite of the lengthy elaboration that each piece requires) are indeed imbued by the female experience, either focusing on the female body or else on mother earth, nature, forests, gardens and trees.
These two main motifs, of course, overlap giving birth to hybridizations, for example inserting sexual organs within the structure of flowers, or else fusing the female body and the landscape. But, in general, they are differently treated. The work focusing on female identity produces bold imagery marked by an iconic center element, either the female body, or a metamorphic rendition of it, or else an empty dress endowed with the same liveliness. On the contrary, the work focusing on nature insists on multitude, drawing intricate arabesques in which the vegetal and the merely abstract intertwine.
Marthe Aponte—Birds—Picoté—2018—Courtesy of the Artist
T.O. Many of your “picotés” evoke oriental decors in their sinuous, ornate sensibility. What does the word “arabesque” mean to you?
M.A. I had never thought about it, but yes, the word arabesque fits well with my work. In 2017 I asked a friend to make a wooden structure that would represent a “mashrabiya.” I planned to insert elaborate “picoté” surfaces within the frame, and I eventually will. I have always been fascinated by Arabic calligraphy and designs.
T.O. Do you draw the initial design for these complex works?
M.A. I often start punching holes without any previous drawing, following my intuition. I divide the page in two sides, and I measure them to make sure they are the same length. I don’t know why I do this… My work wants to be symmetrical, a bit like a French garden. I always start from the center and then work on the right side, later mirroring it on the left while adding slight changes. I would say that the whole process is like automatic writing. I enjoy the adventure of the empty page. I feel confident that I’d always find a solution to any problem that might occur.
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Then, those rich floral labyrinths are only apparently erratic. They contain a hidden symmetry, neither rigorous nor mechanic, rather flexible, as it happens with the human body and in nature.
Aponte lived in France, Venezuela and now in Lancaster, California. Having sporadically drawn and painted throughout her life, simultaneously working as a French instructor, a decade ago she decided to fully embrace her artistic call. The switch wasn’t due to facilitating circumstances but to a shift in self-awareness, to a self-redefinition eased by the enthusiastic response her work gathered within her new community.
A decade ago, she didn’t use “picoté” but acrylic paint on canvas or wood, in bright, contrasting colors. Still, her surface in those early works is already finely dotted, also enhanced by glued sequins and beads or else pocked with nails.
Marthe Aponte—Blue Forest—Painting—2015—Courtesy of the Artist
T.O. Where does your fascination with dots come from?
M.A. When I was eighteen years old I felt I needed glasses. The first day I put them on, my vision of the world changed all of a sudden. Now I could see the details of a leaf, for instance, as I had never before. In response, I started painting with dots. I liked the repetitive motion that such method implies. I felt confident and free as I practiced it, therefore I didn’t take painting or drawing classes and I never learned how to reproduce reality, which is a kind of blessing, because thanks to such limitation I found my own style.
I also loved Seurat and the pointillist painters, but I don’t believe that I tried to imitate them. At least, not in a conscious way.
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The early paintings display the same subjects later found in Aponte’s “picoté” work, luscious tangles of triumphing nature, and woman. Woman as a solo, a silhouetted body either vertically or horizontally dominating the background, melting into land, plant, or animal, often or always faceless, part goddess, part shadow.
Marthe Aponte—Pear Blossom—Painting—2011—Courtesy of the Artist
T.O. Why are the female figures you paint so frequently faceless? What does their lack of features imply?
M.A. When I was a little girl I felt powerless, because I didn’t know how to play the social game. Unlike me, my sister knew the right words to say on each occasion. She understood how people functioned together. I was awkward, and always said the wrong thing. So I decided to stay within my own world. All the women I paint are immersed in their inner gaze. They are oblivious of the surrounding world. Sometimes I even cover their face with a turtle, an animal that I truly love because it is quiet, mysterious, doesn’t try to dominate and has a life of its own.
T.O. In some instances though, this very idea of powerlessness seems to imply deeper implications. For example in “Censorship,” where an armless woman sits with her legs spread and mouth taped, or in “Children under the Trees,” where a row of sculpted children, also armless, stand below the painted canvas as if buried underground.
M.A. The mouth-taped woman expresses how I felt as someone who was different, who did not understand social codes. It translates the difficulty of finding people with whom I could identify. I like to recite poetry. I love silence, to be by myself for hours, watch the sky, the clouds, flowers, trees, leaves, while enjoying the smell of the grass. I have a contemplative nature. It was hard to adjust to the US where being active, doing things, practice sports, being competitive is paramount. And the children… they are the foundation of the world, and yet the world dominates them.
Marthe Aponte—Censorship—Mixed Media—2011—Courtesy of the Artist
T.O. So you found it hard to identify yourself within society, which is not unusual for artists. On your website, you comment on a “picoté” titled “Non Identified Object” with these words: “to imagine a space that would escape labeling and identity, also questioning the criteria for labeling.” Could you further elaborate?
M.A. I like the idea that everything is a mystery. I feel quite uncomfortable with people who pretend to explain the universe as if no more room were left for discovery. I always want to leave a place to the imagination and suggest that there is something else underneath the surface.
T.O. And in fact your “picoté” work increasingly implies the use of layers, underlying strata hinted at through holes, cuts and openings in the paper, sometimes coming into the foreground and then vanishing like an underground stream. Does the idea of subjacent layers that go often unseen connect with the wish of escaping labeling?
M.A. Yes. Labeling is an aporia, or as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida would say it’s a pharmakon. It heals and kills at the same time. We need labels but we also need to be aware of their limitations. Before coming to Lancaster, I studied with Derrida at the University of California Irvine. His philosophy fundamentally questioned binary thinking, black versus white, day versus night, good versus bad, yin versus yang and so forth. It is yin within yang, not yin and/ or yang… Understanding this was crucial for me.
Marthe Aponte—Non Identified Object—Picoté—2016—Courtesy of the Artist
A few paintings portray two female figures. Rather, a double one. “The Two Eves,” is inspired by the myth of Genesis. Face to face, two women hold a giant egg while their hair branches off into a maze filling the rest of the canvas. The whole design reads like a huge Rorschach card. “White, Black, and Unknown Being” is a triptych also portraying two women, one almost the photo negative of the other. A third silhouette, in the center, incarnates the stage of their melting or else separating, the hybrid point of transition. Frida Khalo’s “Two Fridas” inevitably comes to mind.
Here, the peculiar symmetry later found in Aponte’s “picoté” work is already evident. Two halves unfold from a central axis, set to mirror each other, and yet not quite.
Marthe Aponte—The Two Eves—Painting—2011—Courtesy of the Artist
T.O. “White, Black and Unknown Being” as well as “The Two Eves” strongly suggest the idea of duality being questioned, and then somehow resolved.
M.A. Both paintings were made ten years ago and inspired by drawings I did in the late seventies. I lived in Venezuela by then, and I was going through a very difficult relationship. I believe that I used my drawings as therapy. I only drew female bodies, two in one. Luckily, that period of my life is far in the past. For these paintings I resumed a type of imagery that I had previously used, while I was already starting to develop a new language, which grapples no more with duality.
Or, it does it otherwise. In my “picoté,” each side of the piece embodies a different mood. As I start from the right with no previous sketch, although I am confident, I have to invent every move and it takes much thinking. I might stumble. I might need to abandon the project because I have ruined it. But when I begin the left side my design is already found. I feel freer. I can change and add things for the fun of it. The right side is about thinking, doubts, fear and effort. The left side is lighter.
Marthe Aponte—Looking for the Most Immaculate Dress—Picoté—2017—Courtesy of the Artist
T.O. I would like to explore the idea of the dress, which sometimes replaces the figure at the core of your piece. Are these bridal dresses or the habits of nuns? Folk costumes, or the clothing or paper dolls? The dress gifted with a personality of its own is typical of Frida Khalo’s art. For her, it symbolically recreated the integrity of her body, which had been so crucially wounded. It was like a protective husk or an exoskeleton. What does it mean for you?
M.A. I am interested in a historical critique of the dress and its ideology. I grew up in a small town in France, and I was a tomboy. I felt awkward in a dress, just as didn’t like to wear stockings or pantyhose. In the sixties I was one of the first to wear pants and the principal of my school even called me into her office, once, to explain I should not.
“Looking for the most immaculate dress” alludes to the obsession of purity, to the wedding dress that is never white enough. Although things are changing in Western societies, the myth is still there. When I chose the title for this piece I was thinking of Toni Morrison’s book, The bluest eyes. Women in a patriarchal society will never be pure enough. If she is raped, it’s because of her foul desires, and so forth.
“The Dress and its Demons” is about the years nineteen fifties, when housewives were supposed to be perfectly attired even while doing chores. I was thinking about the advertisements of cleaning products showing women sweeping the floor in full apparel. The red demons I inked all around the dress symbolize the real feelings between wife and husband. Also, how women’s bodies were always conditioned by the male gaze.
Marthe Aponte—The Dress and its Demons—Picoté—2017—Courtesy of the Artist
T.O. Then, the dress is the surface and the demons are what lies behind it. Again, layers. But let us go back to the undressed body. I am intrigued by the intersections of your work based on women and your work on nature. Many of your early figures sprouted trees from their flesh, just as mother earth does. Recently, you directly transform female bodies or dresses into trees. How are woman and nature connected in your vision?
M.A. Once, in my teenage, I had a striking experience of connection with nature. I was lying on a meadow surrounded by poplars, next to my grandfather’s house, when I suddenly felt the earth move in a circle with me, very slowly. I could say that this episode is the matrix of all of my artwork. When I started painting full time in 2010 I remembered that moment and I did a painting of it. When I was ten years old I also used to climb an old poplar, at my grandfather’s house. It was my place of choice, my refuge. I always had a concrete physical link with trees and the earth.
Also, I have been always inspired by so-called naïve painters. Have you seen “The sleeping Gypsy” by Henri Rousseau? It portrays a woman lying on the ground, in the midst of a jungle of tress…
Marthe Aponte—Children Under the Trees—Painting and porcelain dolls—2015—Courtesy of the Artist
TO. I am intrigued by the shift of your work from bold and bright hues towards… variations on white? Does the expression “white on white” exist in the French language? In my tongue it used to define the most priced embroidery, meant for altar clothes and bridal trousseaus. It was precious because its making required special care, as any trace of dirt would fatally show. It required excellent eyesight, because of the minimal contrast between design and background. The appreciation of it also implied very close attention. It was a rather secretive kind of beauty, not jumping at your face, more intimate than flamboyant.
M.A. Well, you described it perfectly. “White on white” is just what you said! Since the start, I was reluctant about adding colors to “picoté.” I felt they would be a distraction. I wanted people to forget about the outside world and be lost within the intricacies. Wait! Was I asking for some kind of purity? I should think about what type of gaze I expect from the viewer!
And yet there’s something ascetic, almost sacred about “picoté,” though not in a religious sense, maybe because the technique is so physically and mentally demanding. That is why lately I am making fun collages that don’t require that kind of discipline.
T.O. I believe that the absence of colors exalts the tactility of your pieces, as it concentrates the attention on their tridimensional aspect. And it concentrates the attention tout court, asking the viewer to slow down, focus carefully. On your website, you say that white on white “invites shadow to play out on the surface in unique ways. This play between light and dark gives depth to the work” with, you add, “a minimal amount of mediation.” Do you mean that, paradoxically, the complexity is achieved with the simplest means?
M.A. Yes, the challenge for me is to produce art with minimum technology. I only use my hand, paper and an awl. Lately I have added sequins, beads, thread, but those elements are still low tech. I love the idea of doing something with nothing, almost. And I love to improvise.
Marthe Aponte—Birth of a Tree—Detail—Picoté—2019—Courtesy of the Artist
Marthe Aponte is a self-taught artist who began her practice in the Antelope Valley 10 years ago. She draws inspiration from her life in France, Venezuela, and America. Her current practice focuses on “picoté”. It’s an art form defined by delicate patterns and textures produced by piercing tiny holes in paper with a punching tool.
She has participated in numerous exhibitions throughout Los Angeles County, including Coagula Curatorial’s Sweet 16 Juried Exhibition, and 2017’s stART Up Art Fair. She was also awarded the Beryl Amspoker Memorial Award for Outstanding Female Artists during MOAH’s Annual Juried Exhibition, Cedarfest. She had several solo shows including The Loft At Liz’s for the “Forest Bathing” show, “Fleurs Imaginaires” at The Metro gallery in Pomona, “Anatomie végétale” at the Alliance française Art Gallery in Pasadena, El Camino College Art Gallery in Torrance and many other group shows.