Centro Cultural José Amadeo Conte Grand de San Juan – 2010
“writing and drawing are, in essence, identical…” Paul Klee
Sign and writing, on the wall, on paper, as an organic print or a digital trace; the artist’s expression takes over the pictorial support or breaks free from it in a process that intends to reflect a world, the inside and the outside, the conscience and the dream. Alberto Mendez, Elena Nieves, Candelaria Palacios, Teresa Pereda, Jorge Sarsale and Laura Viñas appeal to the spectator’s silent complicity and unfold an essential art vocabulary: the sharp edge of a line, the sensitive curve of the stroke, black and white, the trace of a footprint. Entanglements that seem to respond to the emergence of sensitive internal rhythms. All six artists belong to an intermediate generation that has a noteworthy career in the artistic field and whose work has already received the attention and acknowledgement of several national and international institutions. The wish to hold a group exhibition is driven by the intimate desire to place their work in dialogue, among them and with other works. In a low tone, as silent spaces awaiting responses, the grouping of the exhibited works is the product of the natural attraction exerted by a harmony of unique and mature voices.
In this way, the works of Mendez settle between the seduction of the shape and the corrosive humor of the text. Black and white, straight lines and curves, alignment and compensation, word breaks or periods, disrupt functions and, as reading is difficult, appeal purely to the visual. Then, the satirical ease of the text seeks to restore an order, as if a constant tension was established between them.
Likewise, if animation is marked by movement, Laura Viñas’ inanimate drawings retrace urgencies and resort to slowness, to the pause on the plane, while her portraits are based on the blurred details, on graphism or the stain that characterizes, like a romantic reaffirmation on the most current and rigid of technologies.
In Candelaria Palacios’ work, in turn, the ink weave design on paper recaptures the very notion of the fabric, the intertwining lines and colors, the twisting of colored fiber, the creation of a pattern. At times, the ink stroke also evokes organic shapes, whirlwinds, landscapes and ambiguous figures. Weaved fabrics, cubicles, are connected by a thread, the thread of drawing.
The same trust that Elena Nieves places on the stroke of ink. Large spaces, a razzle dazzle of lines, branches, puddles, reeds, withered weeds or trampled grass. A landscape that is enunciated, denied and organized by geometrical clippings of emptiness. Negative and positive, the subtle power of black and its shadow, the brief latency of greys and whites, transparency.
Almost the same powerful lightness of the work of Jorge Sarsale. Tangled colors, cavities of different shadow planes that strive to extend and go into the space. The clues of the real world are only hints, warning signs. Freed from the pictorial support, matter becomes oriental writing or sheet music scribbled on a wall. It has, once again, lost its function to become illegible; it settles like pure shape, with volume, as a seductive and disturbing presence.
In turn, the impact of Teresa Pereda’s land graphs lies on the weight of absence. As a record of the dream state of the land, paper bears the imprints left by matter. Dust and the organic –plants, bubbles or microorganisms– leave, after being immersed in water for a long time, a trace that marks their presence. Hence, the pictorial support becomes the ethereal storage place of a trace, the poetical writing of the absent element.
The answer to the webs of letters are swarms of color, floods of lines, the silence of emptiness, signs, oriental calligraphy, pure writing. Those are voices that pose a question to themselves while putting a question to others. Each artistic element carries the mark of the sensibility of the age: our age. The artists offer and complete themselves in looking for the spectator’s attention.