The nature present in the landscapes we propose in Un mundo que no existe beats and breathes, it is life-giving and is generated by emotions, experiences, interior landscapes and dream worlds. In contrast to the landscapes we are accustomed to seeing in art historiography -mostly made by male names- we have developed an exhibition project with four women artists -Ana Teresa Barboza, Laura López Balza, Maria Acuyo and Noemí Iglesias- who move away from fictional objectivity to compose worlds that, for different reasons, do not exist.
Far away are those idealized, exoticized landscapes, full of abundance and animals from distant lands. Bucolic scenes of French and English gardens with Palladian architectures; of impenetrable forests with medieval atmospheres filled with ruins… a whole pictorial imaginary subject to our retina that beyond conforming a reliable portrait of a reality and a concrete moment, represent fictions sustained in scientific progress, modern temporality or the construction of the Other. Ideas that have constantly hovered over each of the brushstrokes of the landscape genre with the aim of constituting a unique gaze based on the hegemony of ocularcentrism.
The temporality ascribed to these images imposed a single, productive and technological time. They shaped an abiotic society whose inheritance in today’s capitalism has ended up taking this hegemonic time to its highest heights, creating a whole semantics of current production based on devouring the borderline, such as nature, to end up turning it into a useful tool. The way it is used and the consequences it entails are not of the greatest relevance in our current context.
Are sensitive life and aesthetic experiences becoming stagnant in the midst of so much noise? How can we separate the wheat from the chaff? There is talk of infoxication or information overload (for the more globalized). We live in a world in which digitalization is on the rise. As a result of this and the speed of a system in which everything can be obtained immediately at the click of a button, we forget that silence exists and that it is necessary in the midst of all the infobesity and, sometimes, we also forget that physical contact and direct experience are irreplaceable. Perhaps, rather than resetting and returning to the starting point, it would be wiser to pause and rethink the situation. Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy in the book “The Aesthetization of the World. Living in the age of artistic capitalism” they warn: We are in the age of the de-absolutization of art, both of its missions and of its lived experience. For some time now it has been common to hear conversations of the following type:
-I have seen such an exhibition.
-Oh, yes, I’m looking forward to visiting it. I’ve read about it and I’m attracted to both the subject matter and the artists. So what do you think? What did you think? Did you like the staging?
-From what I could see on social networks, I thought it was not bad.
I think we are missing the point; the tools at our disposal are a means, not an end. Lipovetsky and Serroy add: An aesthetic life worthy of the name should not be imprisoned by the limits of market rules, nor should it be realized in a universe victim of haste and urgency. It is necessary to meet again with the exhibition, with the works shown, to physically enjoy their arrangement in space. And this must be done slowly, contemplatively, in silence. Banishing, even, any craving for explanation. Banishing, even, this text.
I return to Corbin when I affirm that thought works in silence and that learning silence is all the more essential because silence is the element in which important things are forged. Important from the point of view of the artist working on his work in the studio, as well as from the viewer who then approaches those works in an exhibition. With this in mind, Nuria Fernández, director of Espacio Líquido, has brought together the works of Irma Álvarez-Laviada, Lara Ruiz, Shirin Salehi and Job Sánchez Julián in an exhibition entitled SILENCIO.
I confess my predilection for the silent arts. With this revelation Eugène Delacroix appealed to the mute charm and seriousness of painting and sculpture as opposed to the word, so talkative itself. The word, indiscreet, solicits attention, while the strength of painting and sculpture would operate in the silence of the gaze.
Irma Álvarez-Laviada’s Pedestal , inspired by the various restoration processes of the Patio de los Leones of the Alhambra, adds with each marble layer a base that finally does not support anything physical, but metaphorical, since dispossessed of any architectural function, it shelters the chromatic memory of the various pavements silenced by the processes of covering or elimination of the successive historical eras.
Lara Ruiz’s works are conceived on the basis of formal simplicity and dialogue with the space in which they are located. In her tubular structures and simple geometries, emptiness has a marked importance as an essential element both for the construction of the pieces themselves and the place in which they are placed, as well as in their interaction with the public. The void, as an absence of matter, is a necessary spatial silence that is an active part of his compositions.
Shirin Salehi longs for the work of art not to manifest its full meaning in the first instance and rebels against the prevailing culture of superficiality. Piano piano si arriva lontano is an Italian proverb. In the face of visual overabundance, his intimate and delicate work requires a calm gaze to delve into its aesthetic and conceptual depth. If we approach slowly, we will go far. In the face of the image-spectacle, subtlety; in the face of excess, recollection; in the face of noise, silence.
Job Sánchez Julián’s chromatic exercises, closer to the field of craftsmanship (patterns or rhythms of ceramic or textile design) transform the circle and the square to elaborate cryptic visual messages. The communication of the created language is silent, only transmitted through a code of shapes and colors not exempt of interferences due to the impossibility of showing compact images.
Four artists, four ways of facing creation, four ways of visualizing silence. And a way of approaching the exhibition. Let us not be skeptical, do not forget that silence is also meaning. Words of Walt Whitman.
Text Natalia Alonso Arduengo
Activity subsidized by:
The artists gathered here create with the organic, slow and dense rhythms of nature through compositions that start from personal experiences in a distant territory -real, abstract or mental- that they do not exoticize, but understand in all their mythical narratives to be included in them. His works traverse intimate and tangible landscapes from a temporality and a rhythm more typical of the nature of the affective and the organic than of contemporary instantaneity.
The fictional landscapes created by Ana Teresa Barboza and Noemí Iglesias present a way of approaching the natural ecosystem from a complete imbrication with it. The direct experience with their creations comes from a careful manufacturing -related to the context-, by the components used and the hybrid materializations that constitute a multitude of realities. They make up utopias of worlds that do not exist, because we do not see them or because they are about to disappear… Understanding his fictions from the reality that structures them and that in his works are politics, ecology or our relationship with the environment. The connection of his works with the landscape is not produced in a unidirectional way, as an experience for the eye, but as a way to place ourselves in the context of nature as a way of thinking and habitability, giving our reflections the power of sensitive and conscious nature.
In the works of Ana Teresa Barboza this is reflected in the use of natural fibers in her weavings and the photographic record of the Peruvian landscape. The construction of these fictions connects the act of weaving, so closely linked to women, the intimate and the domestic, with a creative perspective, bursting with force into this territory populated by men. The artist transforms the landscape so that the change in our consciousness, with respect to its journey and experience, is real. The spectrum of the natural has run through her work from the study and experimentation of plants, the earth, and even the symbolic and ritual power of water. And it is precisely these investigations of the landscape and the Latin American context that are crossed by political issues, which have overflown and empowered her context and which, in her case, are presented from the denunciation of a landscape that is violated for belonging to others, for being fictionalized from the outside and for being continually destroyed in pursuit of productivity. Therefore, the way to inhabit it from new possibilities is part of the engine of change that his artistic practice implies and that he concretizes in his works, connoted by issues close to the environment and environmentalism.
The natural world has been present in all of Noemí Iglesias‘ work. We see it in her delicate porcelain flowers and in her projects, sometimes performative, where she questions universal themes such as love and its commodification; desire and political transformation, or patriarchal systems in the industrial environment. In Un mundo que no existe she shows hybrid creatures, a combination of the body of a parrot -paradigm of an exotic animal- with a finish of flowers that covers and grows all over her face. The small buds are its airways; their symbiosis is clear, the survival of one cannot occur without the other. And in this metaphorical sense, our relationship with the natural world starts from this dependence. Beyond our implicit inclusion in the works, these creatures open our minds to new possible imaginaries, new ways of imagining and thinking the natural territory away from the fictional, objective and aseptic images of reason.
The subjective landscapes of Laura López Balza and Maria Acuyo start from the interior and revere the importance of the depth of the stories that take place in their works, as opposed to the official objective history. The artists create enigmatic scenographies that move away from the superficial aspects, starting from experiences, from the symbolic power of the created elements and the organic plasticity of painting. Cellular forms, atmospheres with glazes and scenes of great chromatic force captivate us and activate our imagination to connect us with the symbolic that brings with it the rite and the belief.
One of the references that Laura López Balza takes in her work is the mythical aspect of legends in Senegal, her place of residence. In her own words, the magic of the everyday, exists in the performative language, since the acts of enunciation of the stories are those that create reality by naming them. A word turned into action, which, when transmitted by oral tradition, López Balza replicates as a simulacrum through pictorial language. He designates the rite, the characters and the natural context as the construct of a new mythology, a perpetual invention. His relationship with it is produced, as with the landscape he represents, from his own experiences. With an intimate look that starts from the emotions and endows the nature he travels through with an organicist and sensitive character.
The artist treats scenes, characters and colors with a very personal and characteristic design, formally primitivist, reminiscent of art brut. The rules of perspective and proportion are eliminated to accentuate the visual power of compositions in which a powerful chromatism, crossed by the imaginary and the ritual, gives shape to the microcosm of the artist.
Maria Acuyo ‘s paintings release a sinister attraction generated by the coexistence of cryptic and abstract forms with realistic romantic landscapes. With her work she searches with tenacity for the essence of the plastic to reach the balance in the compositions. The substratum that we find among his ovals, glazes and masses is an organic imaginary that for years he has cultivated with an almost automatic technical skill from his scientific training. His arrangement of artistic processes is also born from the biological systems found in nature, understanding each subsystem as a composition of successive ones, and a functional hierarchy where those found in the first levels regulate the following ones. In his paintings, it is the first layers that hierarchize the subsequent ones, and in this way, the practice of elaborating layer upon layer, acquires a power that regulates the weight and form of the structural elements.
The result is natural scenes with atmospheres that soften the superimposed layers and introduce us to the most hidden aspects of our unconscious. Acuyo wishes, like the surrealists, to eliminate the regulatory intervention of reason -in Breton’s own words- and let himself be guided by the dream worlds of our imagination.
These four artists, by composing worlds that do not exist, propose approaches from different places around the landscape and the natural world; different scenarios with a common point, the need to continue activating them today. Their proposals do not create the landscape; they are the landscape. They generate it and generate themselves. They form a cartography that shelters the different forms of natural life, governed by the times of gestation and maturation in their processes and associating symbiotically with their different biogeographical, cultural and historical habitats. The struggle for the existence of the worlds that do not exist depends on each spectator being able to conform to the natural landscape, stopping his body and mind when confronted with the works. That he can also make use of all the organisms located there to produce a new natural science of relations with them, which will not arise from the rational aspect, but from the empirical, sensitive and emotional.