Freud wrote in 1905 "Seeing is ultimately derived from touching.

Freud wrote in 1905 "Seeing is ultimately derived from touching," which is sexually "indispensable," "a source of pleasure." The greatest in quantity "touching" textures in paint are subliminally sexual, that is, poignantly suggestive of tactile sensations abstracted from an view Freud's insight comes to mind when faced with Nora Speyer's canvases and their richly evocative, peculiarly impacted primordial make not to mention her vision of basic sexual objects--bodies (mostly naked and female) orgiastically entangled at times if it were not that more often falling in abysmal space, like animating principles in traditional images of hell.

As is well known, Freud associates dreams of falling with anxiety and (especially in the case of women) renounce to temptation. Speyer's often open-mouthed "Dream Sequence" figures be seen to reflect both. In Dream succession II, 1996, the anxiety aroused by way of surrender seems explicit: A woman (a troubl Danae, perhaps) pretends to be simultaneously falling and reclining in a new meadow dotted with flowers that bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to luminous coins.

Ero is everywhere evident in Speyer's imagery, as is Thanatos. In Dream order of succession I, 1996, a half-naked woman averts her judgments from a grimacing skull, a format familiar from Redon and nibble Speyer is explicit about her allegiance to Symbolism as well as Expressionism. These moves are of course now part of the novel tradition, but Speyer adds something unruffled more traditional: a sense of the archetypal or universal. According to as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but Jung and the contemporary sociobiologist Edward O Wilson, human nature is characterized by means of archetypes; Speyer's recurring figures and erotically evocative palette (lurid violet, dove-like green) seem to express relinquish to erotic temptation as single in kind of these.

Again and again we descry the archaic figures in situations of danger, sometimes happily surrendering to their fate, as in Dream order of succession VIII, 1999, where painful falling looks to have become pleasurable floating. The 1998 collage drawing from which the painting derives--for all the care with which she contributes the bodies, Speyer's black-and-white drawings are a wonderfully release weave of lines and tones--shows the female figure with a strange smile forward her face. But here she strike one as beings to be tumbling or flipping from one side of to the other herself, suggesting that, after all other anxiety remains the dominant emotion in Speyer's erotic dreams.

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