Diverse. Poetics of Nature, the exhibition that commemorates the culmination of Jeannette Betancourt's residency at the Museum and Center for Humanistic Studies, of the Ana G. Méndez University, works as a retrospective of the work of her last three years by bringing together pieces that explore the themes for which we know her best: the human gaze towards nature and the environment that we take advantage of without measure. With Diverso, the first Puerto Rican from the diaspora to be an Artist-in-Residence at the MCEH, she proposes a dialogue between material and concept that extracts the soul of our natural environment so that we question our relationship with it.
The exhibition that we find at the MCEH is serene and invites contemplation, although in its signifiers there are serious issues that should cause us more anxiety and desire to act than tranquility. The artist uses neutral and natural tones, such as ochres, greens, siennas and terracottas and introduces us to a space full of foliage, which causes a sense of home in humanity. But it is precisely that home, finite and fragile, that we must also think of when we enter the works of Jeannette Betancourt. The artist uses the same materials with which she makes her works to delve into these concepts. Her photographs, for example, are digital, an elaborate artificial medium that requires the human hand to be altered, but with them she captures nature in a hyperrealistic manner by superimposing images that provide three-dimensionality and texture to the image. In Valle de Bravo III, the incorporation of rocks, leaves and silhouettes left by fern leaves on the ground allows us to feel that we are stepping on the water of a stream. In this way, the artist suggests that the modeling of our environment and the Earth's resources is part of our life in every way and we must question this control.
In other pieces, such as The Beginning of Many Endings, Ecosystems and Growing in the Middle of the Garden, among others, rather than provoking anxiety about the loss of natural environments, they allude to plant wealth and its regeneration processes. The beginning of many endings shows a series of beautifully arranged leaves, ranging from dark green to light brown suggesting the process of foliage falling that is then broken down by forest floor animals, turning them into compost that serves as a nutrient for new plants. Such restoration scenes can be seen in Ecosystems, Growing in the middle of the garden, Hanging garden and Inner garden that show the incipient vegetation with a whole range of natural colors that the artist creates with attention to detail. The silhouettes that allude to grass, branches and leaves, among others, are filled with natural shapes with which the artist redoubles the effort to witness life and regeneration.
The materials used by Jeannette Betancourt range from digital, such as her videos and photographs, to organic, such as linen and wood, but they are always altered in some way, either by the artist or by the person who made it originally. The artist herself stipulates that both creating with these materials and constructing these images is an impossible challenge to overcome because nature cannot be molded to our liking and imposes its limits. Both a branch and the strands of the flax plant or vegetable fibers turned into paper have their capacities that we cannot force into the impossible.
Although the central theme of Jeannette Betancourt's work has been nature for the past decades, her work also dialogues with abstraction. When witnessing pieces such as Equilibrium, Ecosystems, Germinal/Profuse, Last Call and Botanic Chapel we cannot help but feel that we are outside, in a completely natural environment and not in a museum. However, when looking at them closely, although the works evoke mountains, leaves and plants, the patterns painted on their fabrics or created through wire and metal are abstractions that range from the geometric to the organic. Thus, Betancourt becomes part of a tradition of Puerto Rican artists who have reflected the landscape in abstraction, such as Olga Albizu and Noemí Ruiz, among others. In Last Call, both the forms with which Jeannette Betancourt handles the material and the curves and lines painted or dyed on the linen evoke the organic without making any direct reference to observable objects or beings. This piece dialogues with Botanic Chapel, whose materials are similar and some of its shapes curved and abstract. However, this latest creation is much more comprehensive, because it is an installation that we can go through and, in addition, because it has a greater range in terms of the forms it recreates. We can see the abstraction in the canvases of the figures in the foreground, but the three-dimensional shapes they take make direct reference to mountains and branches. Likewise, as we approach the installation, we observe that the central figure is a seed and is surrounded by hundreds of impressions of fern leaves, detaching the piece from total abstraction.
The exhibition in its entirety is a landscape. Individually, each piece constitutes a complete and independent panorama, but by uniting them in an exhibition, we can interpret them as a whole. With three-dimensional abstract works created with linen and wood that evoke a natural environment and two-dimensional, multi-layered paintings and photographs, the artist envelops the people who visit the museum as if we were walking through a forest. Finally, Inner Garden connects the exhibition inside the museum with the natural landscape outside and, with its forms that are repeated through installations, paintings and photographs throughout the exhibition, closes the circle of this fictitious landscape that positions us as humanity in our real environment.
Emilia Quiñones Otal, PhD
Mayagüez, Puerto Rico 2024