introduction—Krysia Jopek
The moment I saw Sylvia Van Nooten’s “Tango Dance” in a Facebook group, I knew I wanted to feature a virtual show of her asemic art in diaphanous micro. Her multimedia collages utilize ink and watercolors on the two-dimensional surface of paper to contrast and play with indelibility and fluidity, permanence and timelessness, sculpture and dance, product and process. Her titles contrast the linguistic with the purely-aesthetic language of asemic writing. The reader/viewer is actively involved in the human construction of a multiplicity of subjective meanings against the backdrop of potential existential meaninglessness. Her abstract compositions, like that of Kandinsky, create shape and flow while invoking color as “a power which directly influences the soul” (Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1912. Translated from the German by M.T.H. Sadler, 1977). Please enjoy this sequence of Sylvia Van Nooten’s beautiful visual art in A Love Song to Chaos.
artist statement
My work has little to do with consciously deciding to create a specific thing. Rather, I will find a shape or a color and see where it takes me. I love ink and watercolor because or the way they blend and create interesting drips down the paper. One small drip of blue might turn into a goddess with silver writing. Collage gives me another point from which to start. By suspending my need to “control” what I am doing, I’m able to create organic forms that often speak to people of different elements of their own thought processes. Asemic writing is what, to me, pulls the pieces together into coherency. Although the writing has no specific meaning, it still has the authority of the written word. Thus, I can be obtuse and concrete at the same time.
biographical note
Sylvia Van Nooten is an asemic artist living in western Colorado. Asemic art, with its pastiche of “language” and images, allows her to merge texts and painting, creating a hybrid form of communication, which is open to viewer interpretation. Her multimedia collages have appeared in The South Florida Poetry Journal, Experiment-O Issue 13, Raw Art Review. The cover of the Summer 2020 edition of RAR features her visual art.
She can be contacted by email: [email protected]
If interested in purchasing any of Sylvia Van Nooten’s visual art, please contact her by email.
You can also find her on instagram: