Susana Amundaraín’s luminous, layered abstractions are beautiful and profound. With them this Venezuelan artist simultaneously addresses aesthetic as well as philosophical issues. When you see her work your eyes are refreshed, your mind is challenged.Not that long ago the painter wrote, "I still beleive the meaning of the art form and of the creative process emerge as a reiteration of the human form and of the life process."

Amundaraín has almost always made work that is non-representational. For her this is a commitment, not a fad. Despite the recent art world hum that abstraction was no longer viable, she continued to practice it. And now this allegiance has situated her squarely among a group of dynamic, like-minded painters who are twenty and thirtysomething and based in New York, London and other international centers. Out of the limelight this lively and diverse troop, which includes Philip Taaffe, Suzanne McClelland, Ian Davenport, and Fiona Rae as well as Amundaraín has had the opportunity to develop, mature and accrue impressive bodies of work. Today, besides having experience and confidence, they are in the forefront of a new chapter of art history.

These days the term "non-representational art" evokes something quite different than it did during the sixties, a period once characterized as "the great decade of American abstraction". Certainly, contemporary paintings in this mode are much less uniform than they were decades ago. Techniques, imagery, themes, meaning, and even materials vary enormously from painter to painter. What is shared, however, is the notion that there are paths and avenues that were not fully explored previously and which now merit further investigation. Consequently, many young abstractionists nod in their work to the past as well as to the present. They freely mix and match elements from post-war movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Op, Color Field, and Minimalism as well as earlier Modernists schools too, rather than exclusively mining one style.

Amundaraín paints abstract landscapes. That isn't to say she goes to fields or streams to sketch or photograph, and then returns to her studio to transform her excursions with a vocabulary that's indigenous to the twentieth century. Even if you tried to find a generic plce you thought it resembled what she might have had in mind when she made one of the pictures, you wouldn't succeed. Her art is more concerned with memory, and the way she filters her perceptions. She recreates what she once experienced into a fictive world of lines, colors, shapes, marks, stains, drips, and such.

Amundaraín's canvases don't look like conventional abstract landscapes. You won't find them divided by horizon lines that separate sky from earth. She doesn't paint geometric suns or clouds; nor does she camouflage flower beds or boats bobbing in the water. Yet there is something quite traditional about her art. There are works in which you can almost feel a breeze on your face; tell the time of day or night; and deduce whether you are to put a sweater on or take a jacket off. like most landscapists, Amundaraín relies on color and light to convey many of the "realistic" effects she achieves. She frequently refers to the crucial role these formal elements play in her work when she's asked to discuss or prepare a statement about it. And they, more than anything else, pinpoint her heritage. Amundaraín's artistic lineage can be traced beyond the twentieth century. Her actual roots are in High Renaissance Venice. Though this thirty-eight years old Venezuelan is not depicting Arcadian pleasures enjoyed by gods and goddesses or courtesans and courtiers, she renders comparable sensations and situations which relate to the lives of her present-day viewers.

Several years ago when Amundaraín was asked to only exhibit one half of a diptych in a group show, she prepared a text describing what would become the missing half. Her choice of words and images and the poetic manner in which she combines them provide a rare glimpse into what would otherwise be her non-verbal, pictorial world. She wrote:

"This is the space of the right half of the painting, or it could be the left side if you put yourself in the painting's place. It is almost the same size and almost the same shape as the one on the left, some forms are repeated here, fragments of a mountain, blurred edges between earth and air, wet and humid, soft textured mist without a horizon, diagonals to turn around our direction...Almost the same painting but for a last layer of paint, thin and black. Back to the womb hiding, the most familiar silver bird smashed against the silent wall, ancient witness, when are you present? dream of a mountain, white and black, a ship, a platform, wind and night's wedding at a temple that remains natural, you in the heart and lungs of a planet. Now more beautiful than ever because you can't see it...and perhaps a better choice: nothing but signs to envision it, larger than it is. This is after 'Description of a Picture'."

Besides being haunting, Amundaraín's evocation of the absent portion of her diptych is also instructive. It's a brief but cogent lesson in the difference between abstract artists and those who ordinarily try to explicate their work. Trained wordsmiths -historians, critics, curators- would tend to rely on a formal vocabulary to limn the displaced picture. Amundaraín opts for free association, something which obviously distances her from the Old Masters of Venice the way her non-figuartive forms do. Metaphors pepper Amundaraín's poetic prose as well. Nevertheless her words are filled with the kind of drama associated with, say, Giorgione's "Tempest" or a Venus and Adonis by Titian. There is additionally a bank of shared experiences and feelings which is drawn upon.

Amundaraín has lived in cities all her life. Yet they haven't been typical towered canyons or sprawling urban wastelands. She was born and raised -and is based today- in Caracas. Later she earned her undregraduate and graduate school degrees in Denver, Colorado. Thus her intimacy with tropical mores has been tempered by a town in the American west which is a "mile high" and where snow falls as a common occurrence. Both communities, however, share an unusual trait. Each is a sophisticated town surrounded by enchanting landscapes. You can be in both cities and see the sort of vistas which people who live elsewhere, say, New York must drive for hours to view.

It's tempting to connect Amundaraín's lyrical abstractions to her experiences in city cum country settings. But her art is actually much more a reflection of culture versus nature. This, of course, entails matters having to do with the manmade as opposed to the natural. In the art world of the nineties, this embraces as well notions having to do with conceptual practices mediated by moods and emotions.  And this are merely a few of the dichotomies expressed by the painter in her art. Like the great landscapists of the past Amundaraín is concerned with moral dimensions.

Her efforts in the field of ethics are often overlooked just as they are in work made centuries ago. Consider the Venetian painters although their iconographical programs, organized by philosophers, are interpreted today by academics, museumgoers, oblivious to learned journals and their scholarly contents, relate instead to the beauty Old Master compositions. Though Amundaraín probes psychological terrain, it’s the look of her paintings which primarily seems to captivate her viewers as well. Listen to Amundaraín talking about her art. When she describes how she tries to paint and ineffable quality like “the light in the jungle filtered through layers and layers of vegetation, undefined, with accents” she’s just referring to nature. She also has in mind “the light inside of things”, the kind found, for example, in “man, not just as a social, physical being but as a spiritual one as well”. When she layers pigments on canvas, she’s using mediums to stand in for time. Have you ever noticed how there is often a section in her paintings which looks unfinished because drips still seem to be flowing down? That’s as much a moral decision as a formalist conceit. It introduces into her work an eternal present. These fluid passages secure a sense of the here and now.

Not surprisingly one of the landscapes to which Amundaraín is most drawn is Canaima, one of the few places remaining on earth which still has indigenous flora and fauna. Though this region of tepuis and torrents is practically untamed and uncorrupted, its rawness is the 20th century equivalent of the Arcadias, Ardens and Gardens of Eden revered by the Old Masters. Moreover, Canaima provides settings where artist can still feel inspired. It can’t be replaced by or confused with reproductions in art magazines. It’s a world to be experienced with all the senses. It allows Susana Amundaraín to feel that the abstractions she paints are a “pure form of realism”.