Rose Feller: From Terror to Beauty

Rose Feller: From Terror to Beauty

By Denise Carvalho, Ph.D.

Rose Feller has been working on a series of A4 prints since December of 2019. Her new prints, Spirit of Francis Bacon and Metamorphosis, from 2020, are drawn from thousands of paintings and photographs of human and animal portraits from various periods of art history, and are references to artists like Francis Bacon, Chaim Soutine, and Samuel Gruber. Feller assembles these images via Artificial Intelligence sifting them together as accidental elements of an unknown alchemical formula. As she states, “If I could create a print from a composite of thousands of artists’ works, it would be like I am contemplating their collective consciousness.” She sees her practice as a channel in the process of metamorphosing the invisible sensorial elements from numerous artists’ ideas and emotions, which according to her, continue to evolve even after their deaths. So in death, art allows a new set of elemental rules that reemploy and transform earlier ideas and practices into fresh sensorial experiences and their connection with new technologies. Thus, Feller’s AI prints are raw ways of reading the concept of a disfigured portrait, transforming it through her lens of compassion and acceptance. What she means with this process is that perception shifts the notion of beauty by shedding light into darkness, and by inner defining beauty through disfiguration. For her, that operation allows us viewers to expand our consciousness of both art and life. When we look at art, we are not seeing reality but something that can illuminate our understanding of ourselves as humans, as how we see the world around us. The disfigured faces of the portraits created by Bacon, Soutine, and Gruber reference the dehumanized features of wars, violence, and death. According to Bacon, life seem meaningless in face of the atemporality and imponderability of art. In Feller’s work this is a key aspect of entering darkness through light, shedding painful memories through transformation. 

When her work alludes to issues of violence, it is as if opening a portal toward healing or cleansing from the nefarious leftovers of daily life. Some of her images are examples of how she denotes the opening of the third eye, as she sees art as an initiation to a higher consciousness. Her earlier works applying dead animals as part of her painting process, as in her mixed media Every Life Matters (2018-2020), are like entering the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari distilling death as a process of disfiguration into that of transfiguration. Thinking in terms of Feller’s process, she brings us viewers into her disarranged experience of sensory perception, as we realize the great struggle from terror to beauty. Having experienced violence and abuse in her life, Feller talks about how art allowed her to break from depression. In her mixed media work Turbulence (2019), she was able to break away from depression as she was taken by a cathartic spell that took over her whole body, almost as if she was in a trance. Her use of paint and papier collé became a form of proactive explosion, shifting from anger into color and form. The work also hides in its texture a dead mouse and cheese, the result of a trauma Feller experienced when she was a child, as she saw a mouse being killed through beating. The equation of the beaten mouse and her abuse as an adult are forever linked into her memory. For a very feminine and docile young woman, she remembers during the abuse being suddenly taken by a fearless, self-protective energy against her abuser. She had never realized that side of her consciousness before, embodying it for the next months as she made a series of ten paintings with similar energy. Now, aware that we are neither male or female, but distinct energetic fields in constant channeling and transmuting, she talks about mental illness as an issue that should be considered in this manner. As energies become blocked or overused, they need either rekindling so they can burst into cathartic states, or rebalancing through emotional purging or via affectionate and deeply supportive communication.

Besides violence, mental illness is an important experience that Feller tries to distill through her disfigured portraits. After the displeasing impression of the disfigured portraits begin to disappear in her memory, she notices that it is the beautiful amalgamation of shapes and the colors black, white, and red that continue lingering in her mind, which she justifies as the final sensory perception slowly dissipates into a sublime spectrum of higher consciousness. In the process, details are no longer important and the coalescing harmonious lines and colors transcend to a final element of beauty, which according to the process of remembering, are the last elements to disappear. According to the philosopher Edmund Burke, terror can be a kind of sublime, and can produce strong emotions that have long lasting effects on the mind of the subject. As Burke indicates, terror is dealt with inferior aspects of the self. [i] Finding beauty after a painful experience is a profound determination to manifest light and to overcome the obscurity of pain. It is only through transforming this alchemical imbalances in memory that we can begin creating beauty. Pain then is a very important emotion that is transformed into beauty.

Certain mental illnesses, as depression or bipolar disorder may affect the functional abilities of a person in society, yet be fundamental in their brilliance through their creative works. For example, Van Gogh and Rembrandt were each known for suffering of both mental challenges and the inability to control their temperament in some period of their lives, documented through their inability to function harmoniously in society. However, their artistic genius seemed to illuminate more brilliance when those mental and social challenges were aggravated. Feller draws these ideas into her work, in which mental challenges can be a strength in the creative language. The reason for that is that creativity doesn’t work in a functional society, since creativity is always reinvented, and it cannot reinvent itself if one makes a matrix out of it. Every new idea needs to be fre

[i] Edmund Burke, “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” in Aesthetics A Comprehensive Anthology, pp. 114-122.