Barbara Streiff in NY Artsmagazine International Dr. Phil. Astrid Brunner

AION. She works uncier a web ot rafters. Rafters and Iight entwine at the top of the old railway station in Glarus. Paintings of meditation. A dot on the floor centre. The dot contains all before it unfolds. From the rafter above hangs a spiral wing of burnt and firepainted metal. Underneath is a vessel filled with water. Beside it a burning candle. A patch of pebbles encircles the centre of dat, vessel, and candle.
The installation exemplifies the AION, the ‘primary geometry of the ten archaic symbols Swiss painter and sculptor, Barbara Streiff, has worked out from ancient cultures, her blacksmith ancestors, and her own worldwide travels. The “Vernetzugen,“ or “VerFlechtungen of the ATON symbols are the basis of her work. They are visual texts that ‘explicate [sic] my implications.“ These visual texts are divisible into distinct geometric chiffres, which, once seen, are in each work gathered up again into a total vision.
The method of creating recalls the manner of arguing practiced by the medieval mystics in that it both hides and reveals the‘truth of the intended artistic gesture. The eye returns to the fire-branded metal objects. There is something archaic, wise, and wounded about theirtexture. Punctured bythe burning, glorified like rainbows bythe fire-painting and the cooling in the water, they sing with the pain and pride of their Mary Magdalene maker - no matter what form they are given in the final forming and smithing process.
ATON. She sits at train stations, in Central Park, at Place Pigalle, a current newspaper on her knees. The daily rags around the world are her canvas. The intent of these action “Comics“ is the expressionistic tree tlow ot everyday lite.“ They speak of passion, pathos, and skill. This ‘boulevard performance‘ mirrors from the inside ofwhat passes outside. The process ofthe action “Comics‘ is intuitive. In terms of the ATON they tend to use the sinuous chiffres derived from the dot.

Wornan “giving, loving, revenging,“ is en-wombed in the “Comix Inferno“ triptych that goes back to the Garden of Eden, with a differenc: the snake is not Goethe‘s Mephisto, nor Blake‘s, she is the yielding woman forced into metamorphosis. The giving bird turns snake out of self-defense. In Streift‘s world, woman‘s ‘Schlangenkampf‘ is always just around the next writhing spiral of dove-like love and trust. The gesture is misunderstood, hence woman has only the Ovidian option of metamorphosis. Nightingale becomes silence, loving woman becomes guileful Cobra.
The metal sculptures and comics action-paintings are almost pure process. In contrast, the acrylic on paper meditations are traditional in technique, inward and silently removed in their effect. Lao Tse is not far, nor is the artist‘s father, who built trains in South America and the far east, then returned to the goats in the mountains. Lichen on stone, water in the mountains, a flowering desert, or a rock in the ocean, are hardly state of the art sujets. Nor is the meditative stillness of their effect. The eftect is more than state of the art, its tangible stillness is mystical.
The totality of Streift‘s work is in the ATON signs, which are archaic gestures recognized and realized as “Ur-Geornetrie,“ the (now patented) “primae geometrie“ the artist worked out as fundamentally belonging to all known cultures. Her primary geometry chiffres are also “Ur-Text,“ the primary text residing in all theology. The “Punkt,“ the dot is what in Neo-Platonic language, for instance, is known as the One, lt contains everything before lt unfolds. From the One the way goes through the curvilinear symbols that belong to every gesture, whether cosmic or infinitesimal: circle, star, spiral; the line that, like the dot for curvatures, contains the linear icons, the square, rectangle, triangle, cross, parallel, and the “Blitz,“ the zigzag of lightning.

“Vernetzung,“ texture in its root meaning of “texere,“ ofweavIng things together, also un-weaving them to recall that the complex is the simple, the masculine the feminine, the cosmic the everyday, this is ultimately the import of every gesture Streiff makes, of every mirroring she undertakes.
As ßJON texture her work is enveloping. In thatsense it makes no mater whether the specific expression is the “Comix Inferno“ triptych, the global newspaper comic, or the “intuitive Bewegungsbild“ - crayon paintings created with a circular motion of the hand that is also a form of meditation. The burnt and fire-painted metal sculptures cosmology for all the other works: the spirals, angels‘ wings, the sacrificial vessels that recall “the battle of the snake,“ they all symbolize the creative hand that prays, protects, supplicates.