TIME UNDER TENSION

Virginia Arce

Rupture as a fundamental agent in the transformation of a body, place, and world-view is the

underlying proposition of Time Under Tension, an exhibition of paintings by Eduardo Aispuro and Patricia Liverman. The exhibition’s title is informed in part by the physiological principle of time under tension (TUT), the practice of placing a muscle under strain for a sustained amount of time to such a degree that it will regrow altogether transformed. To follow a regimen of TUT requires a prolonged commitment to enduring physical discomfort with the end-game being the attainment of a body that becomes stronger as it paradoxically always feels as if it’s falling apart. Tension, rupture, and transformation similarly informs the work of Eduardo Aispuro and Patricia Liverman, who mine these acts as necessary factors in shaping our world and our perception of it.

Eduardo Aispuro’s paintings draw upon the language of minimalism to call attention to structures that literally and symbolically shape hierarchies of ideas, labor, social and spatial interactions. The surfaces of his paintings de-emphasize paint itself and call attention to what lies underneath – that which a viewer generally does not see or consider. The literal and symbolic tension of his paintings provide a space for viewers to project a range of ideas regarding what is suppressed and what has yet to be articulated, acknowledged, or named.

Patricia Liverman’s paintings, which imbue the idea of rupture with a poetic sensibility, poses both a conceptual and literal inversion to the approach to tension that Aispuro presents. In her application of fragments of oil paint on flat surfaces, Liverman plays on concepts of trace, eversion, and slow dramatic shifts in space and time. The allusion to topography and geographic time throughout her work functions as a point of departure to consider the disjuncture between natural and manmade ruptures – between our construction of the world and what exceeds our ability to control it.

Placed side by side with one another, Aispuro and Liverman’s paintings pose a kind aesthetic and symbolic dyad between containment and fracture. Similar to the act of a body enduring physical tension for seemingly endless amounts of time in the hopes of growing stronger and somehow better, so do these artist’s works propose that time itself is a necessary condition to gaining some kind of aesthetic or even philosophical understanding effect on the world we make for ourselves and others.