Be you to the full

Monika Holzer-Kernbichler

The movement of the body before her, synchronized with the music, is internalized through the perception of its expression and directly translated into the image. Body, light, shadow, colour—everything is reduced to its essence. This shared moment generates the energy that Ines Valentinitsch captures in rapid, small-format sketches, then applies to the canvas in glazes, spanning the dancer's full-length figure. The colour flows like the dancer herself; her movements arise in response to the music, which in turn responds to the movements. The performance thrives on this shared moment, on engaging with one another in time and space, on seeing, feeling, hearing, and translating onto the canvas. The two artists communicate implicitly through the music.

The historic space of the Palais Dietrichstein in Graz is darkened beneath the baroque secco-painting, which, amidst the opulent stucco, only hints at Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the blackness of the room, the soft light casts a focused spotlight on the moving bodies. In the background, a filmic reflection of the scene plays. Female bodies interact, unclothed, sometimes in shadow, sometimes superimposed in individual scenes, all in black and white. A voice can be heard gently repeating "be you to the full" until only "be-au-ti-ful" remains.

Space

Ines Valentinitsch selects the spaces for her performances with great care. What they all have in common is a historical setting that is not perfect. The spaces are full of traces of their history, located in old palaces, having lost the splendor of a glorious past. In their full size, they recall their original, representative function. The empty space becomes a backdrop, a temporary stage, and a studio in which she seeks to capture the moving body in the moment on paper and the canvases that lie at hand. It also remains significant in the photographs and films that emerge from this process.

Dance

The dancer performs without a script, guided by a narrative that speaks of very personal, emotional experiences. This expressive Japanese dance, called Butoh, is always a highly expressive, emotional performance. With powerful gestures and slow movements, the formless, relentlessly physical dance appears austere and mysterious. It is also called the black dance, in which the body functions as an instrument of transcendental metamorphoses and transformations between different worlds. Butoh draws on the body's memory, which is shaped genetically, biographically, and culturally. The power of the unveiled body is very direct; it resonates within the narrative, whose impact arises primarily from reduction. The dance intensifies in the large, expressive images of the film in the background, culminating in a silent scream. Without words, one sensitively experiences vulnerability and injury.

Body

The dancing body in Butoh is naked, often covered with white paint to shift the focus from nudity to its sculptural, artistic form. "The body sometimes constricts me," says Ines Valentinitsch, and yet at the same time she liberates it from all external constraints. She, too, is unclothed while painting and is always present on stage as the counterpart to the dancer and the audience. Here, however, the white paint does not cover the dancer's body, but is the paint with which the artist works the dark-primed canvases, capturing the dancer's movement, rhythm, and proportion at a rapid pace. Be completely yourself—be you to the full, freed from all external influences, vulnerably exposed to the power of each moment in the flow of the unfolding process.

Nude

Ines Valentinitsch paints nude, even when she works alone in the gallery space. The uncovered body is an enormous projection surface for art historical perspectives as well as for voyeuristic anticipations. Do you love me or do you love my body?

In European art history, the female nude body has appeared in many different forms of expression since at least the depictions of goddesses in antiquity, mostly idealized, corresponding to the beauty ideals of the respective era, and often eroticized. Nudity is never neutral. In the sinfulness of the Christian Middle Ages, the exposed body represents temptation, becomes a moral danger as Eve, and in the depicted purgatory, a warning against vice. In modernity, physicality detaches itself from the symbolic, losing its transcendent and earthly dimensions in favour of immediate realities. Women become visible as models and serve as subjects for nude studies in painting education. For precisely this reason, female artists were long denied access to academies. The study of nude bodies was considered morally reprehensible for women (from good families). As a nude (and socially insignificant) model, her services are simultaneously sought after. For a long time, the male gaze determined how nude women were depicted in art and thus how they were perceived. Through liberation from this objectification, the naked female body is increasingly subjectified. Female artists recognize it as a political field, employing it—as Marina Abramovic does—in performances, even to the point of (self-)harm, and completely exposing it completely. It is about the right to self-determination and the demand for self-empowerment. The female body is political, especially when it comes to power relations, reproductive capacity, and caregiving.

Through her art, Ines Valentinitsch liberates herself from many internal and external constraints. Self-empowerment, independence, and letting go of beauty ideals allow her to concentrate on her innermost being—without fashionable expression and without constructing an external identity. Her approach is less extroverted, less exposed, and more expressive and immediate, both representational and painterly. She clearly contradicts the assumption that nudity is synonymous with a promise of pleasure, demonstrating that a naked body is not inherently suggestive. It is what it is: liberated and vulnerable, radically exposed, both physically and psychologically.

Freedom

Feminism has understood the female body as a site of oppression, as a place that becomes political when patriarchal forces control it. For Hannah Arendt, freedom begins with liberation from external constraints; for her, it is not an internal state but a public, political practice. The freedom to be free is therefore not a given. Being free from everything external enables the creation of something new and an action that can only be fully realized in community. For, according to Arendt, people can only ever be free in relation to one another. In a digital world, freedom is put to a severe test. Self-optimization and self-exploitation characterize a neoliberal psychopolitics that understands how to drive people toward permanent self-improvement. Newer internal constraints create a different kind of unfreedom. In the virtual and thus virtually infinite space of comparison, the (one's own) body is once again constituted as an object.

Ines Valentinitsch liberates herself from this for her painting. In doing so, it creates a space of freedom that reveals a timeless connection with one’s own self. That self one only encounters when one gives it the opportunity to simply be, without wanting and without judging, in order to observe what arises.

Images

Ines Valentinitsch's paintings emerge from the performative act, as a response to the dancer's movements and the music. Sometimes, she herself is the counterpart, her reflection, the subjective perception of her own body in that moment. Her paintings are large-format, rendered on canvas with powerful gestures, drawn with quick strokes on paper, or delicately applied in watercolor. Many of her works are created as series. Ines Valentinitsch understands body proportions, knows what matters, and shifts them in the moment of perception. In the watercolors, where pink dissolves into sharply defined fields of color, the boundaries of the body blur, becoming soft and emphasizing their femininity. They are reminiscent of Marlene Dumas's depictions of the body, which are often perceived as naked, vulnerable, but also erotic and unsettling.

Günther Brus, who supported Ines Valentinitsch in her artistic career, understood his body as a means to art, as raw material and a vehicle for expressing existential experiences. With his actions, he pushed the boundaries of art, society, and above all, his own. While Günther Brus abandoned the canvas as a medium to attack the bourgeois concept of art, Ines Valentinitsch explores socially prescribed notions of the body, which she deconstructs through her painting and performances. She strips the body of its aesthetic shell and gives its essence her full attention.