“eppur si muove”

Por Carlos Rolong De la Cruz*

Movement. What is the universe without it? From the smallest particle to the biggest shapes of what
we feel and perceive, everything makes part of the dynamics that is an uncontainable, irrepressible
perpetuum mobile. Movement generates heat and change, and change generates life. Even in
death's rigidity there are unstoppable movement, and change. The lack of movement would be the
obliteration, the nothingness.

Along history it has always been unsettling to think about movement in painting, beginning with the
stone paintings often depicting a sequence of activities contemporary to the cultures that created
them. One can see how they tried to portray movement when immortalizing their dances, hunts and
rituals. There is, obviously, Plato's Cave, precursor of cinematography. The objective of Futurism
belonging to the European artistic vanguards, was movement where the artists searched
desperately to represent scenes charged with color, movement, speed, and power through
sculpture and painting. These techniques suggest movement, and speed. If we “see” it or “feel“ it, it
is because it is our brain, and not the works themselves, that generates it in our perception.

The Moving Paintings of multimodal artist Sophia von Wrangell take the viewer to experiment
different visual, aural, and emotional sensations. Thus, her work distances itself from the rigidity and
statism that habitually characterize painting. The Moving Painting, which crosses cultural and
space-time frontiers, connects the viewer with their own life experiences, their own thoughts and
imaginations, gifting them the possibility of finding an innumerable wealth of elements that they feel
their own, but which are not necessarily represented in explicit, or even intentional ways.

The composition of the Moving Paintings excels in dynamics and balance, while at the same time
connecting in the observer other circuits that interrupt the linear perception of time and the
consciousness of space. Once their attention is captivated by the Moving Painting, it brings them to
vanish in time, and to exit consciousness, transporting them into a looping in which they enjoy
tranquility, subtlety, and wonder. They send my mind to the slow and flowing practices of
psychosomatic exploration of the Tai Chi or of Butoh. At this stage we can identify the Aristotelian
influence of counterpoint and/or the eastern one, in the study and resolution of the proposal,
marked by a duality of destruction and construction of positions that change along the flow of the
images, but coalesce in the well of Jung's Universal Consciousness. The viewer is sucked into a
peripheral observation of the world, in a succession of shapes and colors, that keep great visual
harmony, thanks to a magistral composition in movement.

To find a frame for Wrangell's work would be like to cut the wings of a discourse founded in
spontaneity and freedom, that allows us to see beyond the figurative and the form, that keeps the
mind in the “here-now”, and does not allow one to think. This opens the way to the right hemisphere
of the brain, the intuitive, the creative, unleashing the creativity of the viewer. Sophia von Wrangell
creates visual poetry with the synergy of several disciplines: digital painting, oil painting,
photography, film, and music. Only through this perceptual, emotional and physiological stimulation,
without disregarding the rest of the components of these works, subconscious story-telling is
already an unquestionable the gift to the observer; they are touched in their essence, see their
paradigms destruct and re-structure; allow themselves to flow with the movement, and generate
inner change.

Carlos Rolong de la Cruz, Barranquilla, July 17th, 2017