A garden makes its way into the Espacio Líquido gallery by the hand of artist Noemi Iglesias Barrios (Asturias, 1987), and its flowers appear before us as if they were categorized in a natural history cabinet, in an alchemy room or in a laboratory, thus revealing themselves each one in a divergent format and situation. This Gijón exhibition comes after his monographic exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza(Love me fast) and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias(Landscapes of Affection) in 2024.
Iglesias practiced a nomadism that took him to Athens at a time of acute economic crisis, where he developed his social commitment, which conditioned his way of approaching the motif, impregnated with a sentimentality that he associates with political upheaval.
Traversed by her oriental experience, which took her to Taiwan, China and South Korea, she thus adheres to the exotic imaginary pursued by western romantics in other times, although her travels lead to a globalized world full of devices that limit and trivialize that same sensitive vein to which she clings. He draws his plastic discourse from the encounter with other realities, but aware of the times he lives in, his results are fully intelligible in a totalizing world that leaves little room for difference.
The inexplicable is intermingled in the work of this author imbued with modernity and tradition in equal parts. Everything she presents is an inexhaustible puzzle where the natural elements are the protagonists because they explain us as never before. And sometimes they are blurred or flickering.
Her way of conceiving porcelain flowers continues to be one of her calling cards and she does not renounce to that starting point that confers an enormous solidity and a special aura to each of her creations. In his works the chosen chromatism, to which he assigns a role, is indebted to the millenary oriental practice that so significantly affected his artistic training. Thus, the artifacts he manufactures, without departing from the ancestral technique of porcelain, are complemented by his usual decantation towards elements related to technology that allow him to take his discourse effectively towards the consumer society and its public projection, on which he persistently reflects.
Love enunciated in a romantic key continues to be her main theme, this time under the formula Where the wild flowers are. Noemi Iglesias takes pleasure in the idea of falling in love, and her work truly reflects that flow of emotions that she investigates and tries to translate at every step through petals, photographs, silkscreen prints, digital prints, videos or LEDs.
Her work preserves an intrinsic aura and this forces the artist to use three-dimensional resources. However, her story is also written and acquires on numerous occasions the format of a mural, where emphatic phrases that support her discourse on love are usually displayed, almost proclamations thought out with a direct language ready to be wasted. His famous “masks of conflict”(Quarantine), exhibited at the Thyssen, perfectly embodied his poetics, between love and social revolution. Unlike other narratives, his is not dramatic and tries to question the viewer with the handling of the logos, and to put the sentimental part (“love or nothing”) first.
Another element present in his pieces is linked to the magical, which even leads to the predictive, taking advantage of the inherent nature of hard stones, endowed with esoteric meaning and connotations since ancient times. Let us not forget that long list of objects made with minerals and rare stones molded in the form of attributes and symbolic elements on which the fate of kingdoms depended.
In order to understand his intelligent work, it is worth mentioning his vital origin, born in the Asturian mining basin at a time when that thriving society was collapsing. That place, like a vigorous and somber ruin, still preserves today synergies and heritage that have influenced him and nourished his romantic awakening. Thus, its restlessness is undoubtedly born of its mining roots, which permeates its character and that of anyone born in a post-industrial landscape as valuable, special and dismembered as that of the middle Nalón valley. This is where the “black gold” was extracted until the paradigm was changed and it was abandoned and discarded without further contemplation.
Fully inserted in the national and international circuit, her research, elaborated between Portugal and Belgium, led her for years to focus on the extraction of cobalt in its very deposits in Norway or Africa and on the meaning it has in the technologized society we live in and which serves as an inescapable framework. The artist goes to the very sources of the great social transformation that plagues us and causes a convulsion in the ecosystem, also shaking the foundations of our very existence, which clearly threatens. This mineral allows her to trace a reflection on what sustains this unbridled consumerism that affects our way of relating to each other, especially in the affective field, channeled and structured by the technology that serves her and allows her to manufacture the artifacts that accompany her most handcrafted objects. Now Noemi Iglesias is in the middle of these “rare earths”, from which emanates the fuel of the present to replace the coal of the first industrial revolutions, among whose rubble heaps she grew up.
Noemi Iglesias, in the middle of rare earths
Juan Carlos Aparicio Vega. University of Oviedo
With the support of:
