THE TRAFFIC BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

Eva Bovenzi

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I.
Your faith will be like gold that has been tested in a fire. 

-1 Peter 1:7

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Gold: symbolic of wealth, beauty and power, has long been used by artists as a way to describe heavenly light and space. Sometimes, in the form of a halo, it can also indicate the divinity of certain figures—angels, saints, and God himself. Creating an atmosphere of luxury and splendor, gold has appeared, over centuries and millennia, in frescoes and paintings on panel as well as in illuminated manuscripts-- even making an appearance in modern and contemporary art in works by artists as diverse as Gustav Klimt, Andy Warhol and El Anatsui.

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In Eva Bovenzi’s current body of work, the presence of gold reflects her deep knowledge of this complicated history. In her abstract paintings and collages, golden pigment deliberately evokes spirituality even as it functions on a formal level. Many years ago, a desire to learn more about classical art took the artist to Greece. Once there, however, she fell in love instead with the Byzantine period, deeply compelled by its stylized, flattened forms silhouetted against gleaming backgrounds. During the early centuries of Byzantine Christianity, gold symbolized the idea of revealing the invisible world of divine beings and angels through the framing and highlighting of those figures with ‘divine light’.

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In 2022, a month-long residency in the Northern Italian town of Assisi provided Bovenzi with the opportunity to visit the famed Basilica of Saint Francis daily. Over and over, she contemplated extraordinary frescoes there by late medieval artists Giotto, Lorenzetti, Martini and Cimabue. Visiting at all hours of the day, she was able to observe thetransformative power of light itself, as areas covered with gold leaf shifted from brilliant reflective shapes, sometimes dominating the composition, to forms that seemed to be painted in a soft ochre-- almost as if a message was being conveyed in a code of light and shadow.

 

After she returned home, Bovenzi began to experiment with metallic paints: not only gold, but copper and silver as well. Such materials aren’t unknown in her earlier work, but her sojourn in Italy had inspired her to experiment in greater depth with the possibilities such materials offered. The paintings in this catalogue, completed between 2022 and 2024, clearly convey her interest in these reflective pigments in abstracted depictions of what she describes as the “traffic between heaven and earth.”

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II.
Gold is the sweat of the sun. 

- Native American proverb

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Like the monks who inhabited the cells in the San Marco monastery where Fra Angelico painted some of his most famous frescoes, Bovenzi has found that solitude and silence are required for her own work. A deep interest in the art and architecture of many different spiritual traditions, ranging from those of early Christianity to Buddhism, Tantra and native American practices, has served as a near-inexhaustible wellspring of inspiration. Each image she makes is meant to evoke meaning and power through abstraction, much in the same way that traditional icons embody their meaning through symbolic narrative: not in the form of words, but in shapes and colors.

The central forms in some of the paintings here simultaneously suggest drapery and the vertiginous landscapes that appear in the backgrounds of some of the frescoes Bovenzi studied in Assisi. In these pre-Renaissance works of devotion, religious belief subordinated the natural to the spiritual, even as such allusions to the physical world began to introduce the idea that the events portrayed were taking place in an earthly environment. Monument (2022), a small study that evokes a portable image used for prayer, features a central rose-colored shape that seems to be simultaneously cloth and cliff, anchored at its base on a band of green and black and surrounded with a background of gold. Its centrality deliberately evokes that of the single figure represented in religious icons intended for personal use.

In other paintings, such as On the Face of Things or Hierophant (both 2024), Bovenzi floats shaped fields of ‘folds’ against a white background, seemingly disregarding each painting’s enclosing rectangle. These idiosyncratic compositions invoke the way frescoes are essentially part of the walls that host them, rather than portable works that can be carried from place to place. Other works that place a single shape against a gold ground, including three from the series titled The Traffic Between Heaven and Earth, seem to suggest both fresco and icon. Magically, they are both movable vehicles for communication between the celestial and the earthly and precise shapes in azure blue and malachite green that float in the heavenly gold that surrounds them.

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Bovenzi’s early work as a sculptor is recalled by some of these forms. For several years, she made shaped reliefs that, surrounded by the white space of wall, floated in a kind of unlimited space. 11 of Swords and Lumen (both 2024), featuring such a shape surrounded by a pale ground, suggest elongated shields. In other works, like Green Wing and Standing Stone (both 2022), a central image, seen against a complex, layered background, is seemingly anchored to the top and/or bottom of the rectangle.

 

Whether seen as a group or experienced singly, it is easy to imagine these works transforming their space. Bovenzi envisions them in relationship to each other-- like images of saints or angels; spirits or goddesses, inhabiting a space between heaven and earth.

 

Maria Porges