Nature is entering the modern discourse with great difficulty. The enlightened architects of modernity (who were not enlightened, much less brilliant), from the very beginning, considered nature as its opposite. In fact, one of the central ideas of the Enlightenment consisted precisely in separating nature from culture. Modern man has to abandon his natural condition to enter and participate in history through culture. That is to say, the Enlightenment, in the name of Reason, came to design and impose a kind of demarcation line between civilization and savagery, between the modern and the pre-modern, between a culturally advanced political state and a natural state empty of all historical and/or cultural content. Therefore, the State of Nature is a brutally animal state, in which one can be free and equal but never rational. The state of nature lacks reason, it is outside the social contract.
If we take into account that modernity is projected from the north-masculine-white-white-rico-heterosexual axis, which is drawn by tracing a horizontal line that crosses the planet from St. Petersburg to New York, it is easy to guess who are those who are relegated to the condition of savages, lacking in Reason and, of course, on the margins of the social pact. The opposite axis (south-female-black-poor-homosexual) has been condemned to be the eternal subaltern. Natural patterns, yes. But dispossessed of reason.
How is it possible that “culture” has replaced “nature” as the central problem of modern thought? Do the subalterns have no basis in history or culture whatsoever?
In the plastic arts, these patterns of nature have been a source of inspiration and material with which to construct escape routes to abandon the dictatorship of “reason” imposed on us by Western regulatory thinking. In the present exhibition we can find several examples.
The feminine world of Chechu Álava appears veiled. Chechu’s women emerge from the mist with the intention of revealing themselves and making themselves present, but without forgetting the smokescreen that history has cast over them. These images can be read as the vindication of an indisputable right by nature: to be a woman and, as such, a fundamental engine of the civilizing process. Marina Núñez also speaks of hysterical women, cyborgs, jellyfish, mummies and other monsters. The nature that Marina gives to the Other is evident. In her work the limits between the savage and the rational, the aberrant and the normative, the human and the technological are diluted. The hybrid, for this artist, is an intrinsic part of a cultural system that cannot leave aside neither the most primitive impulses nor the most overflowing fantasies. Other disadvantaged by this “rational” system that pretends to undermine the validity of the natural are children. Regina Giménez is inspired by the graphics of children’s textbooks, full of pure shapes and colors, to create a world far from the post-industrial and consumerist reality that the most ruthless modernity has left us. His work invites introspection, even self-criticism, to end up in other places that could be thought of as the losers’ lair.
From more material realities we have the works of Ana Teresa Barboza. The physicality of the landscape -a landscape of the silenced south, by the way- and artisanal textile techniques, without any hint of “modernity”, are combined in Ana Teresa’s work with other methods typical of more technologically “advanced” societies. The objective seems to be very clear: to evidence the “natural” origin of the material, to offer the spectator direct contact with it and to promote cultural exchange in a global world. Juan Baraja, for his part, investigates the formal possibilities of light as a constructive material. In the history of photography, light is an unquestionable paradigm of natural pattern. Juan handles the matter-light as an authentic element of construction when capturing the image of buildings, and he does it in such a way that the natural principle is thus imposed on the culturally constructed.
A more abstract but profoundly natural concept, such as love, is the one addressed in her work by artist Noemi Iglesias Barrios. Noemi digs into the quintessential affection to see how it ends up becoming a kind of romantic consumerism and how pure emotions are transformed into interchangeable merchandise within the capitalist system. We see here how the dominant thought absorbs for itself a genuinely natural feeling. Performance, ceramic media and the extremely delicate floral art in porcelain are some of the procedures that the artist uses to materialize her discourse.
The big problem is that this miscalculation, which condemned the State of Nature to absolute nothingness, has not been corrected and it is urgent to do so as soon as possible. This exhibition -Patterns of Nature- aims to help change this reality created by the powers that be.
Juan Llano Borbolla. Llanes. November, 2021.