UNDERSTANDING THE EXPRESSION
• More than color, forces of opposites and intensity
By understanding what color meant to artists like Matisse and other Fauvists, who “used very vivid, almost violent colors, applied in flat patches and extreme contrasts... To achieve an optical vibration that intensified pure emotion” (Elderfield, 1983), I could understand what color truly meant to me.
An exercise in a painting course during my degree was particularly interesting to me — it involved recognizing formalizations that repeatedly appeared in my compositions within my private, everyday environment. I found myself, unknowingly, surrounded by highly saturated and contrasting colors.
It's not just that color has a proven emotionality, as multiple psychology studies have revealed, but when it comes to very vivid and contrasting colors in particular, we are talking about the expression of strong emotional "intensity," just like the Fauvists.
As a child, I spent a lot of time painting the covers of my notebooks with bright colors; and as a young woman, I was struck by how choosing the color of my clothes each day went beyond just putting an outfit together — it had to do with how I felt or what color counterbalanced what I was experiencing emotionally and what was within me beyond an impulse or a momentary state.
Over time, I have come to understand that strong color contrasts, in addition to expressing intensity, function as a meeting of opposing forces that, as we will see later, also speak to us of emotional coexistence and psychic integration of conflicting tensions. Color thus becomes more than an emotional expression; it indexes internal psychic processes of integrating what we are or what resonates intensely within us.
The main materials I use in my paintings are various types of colored waxes (more or less oily) and pastels for the lines; acrylic paint for the backgrounds, which are usually monochromatic and almost flat, or with variations generated by layers of color or a certain texture. The line often dominates the compositions, which is why dry media and working on sheet/paper emerge as the most frequent medium, although works on canvas are also made.
• More than gesture, experience and embrace
Another main quality of the pieces is the gesture. And to talk about gesture, Cy Twombly's words are revealing to me: “It’s instinctive... It’s as if it passes through the nervous system. It’s like the nervous system. It doesn’t describe, it happens... It’s more like living an experience” (Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 2008).
If we analyze the imprint of that "experience" in our pieces, that is, the morphogenetics of the stroke and the forms that usually appear, we find interesting recurring patterns.
Irregular circular shapes appear that close or do not quite close completely and almost always contain within them patches of color and scribbles that they embrace and shelter, an embrace that integrates and accepts — if any element is left out, the tension generated precisely emphasizes that imprint of embrace that is the circular form.
These circles sometimes appear empty, with an elongated line emerging from them as if it were the body with its head. A head proportionally very large for that slender body, showing its fragility in that imbalance. A body that is myself and, as we will see later, a body that is all of us, in reality.
We also find lines that move forward and return backward in a searching attitude; lines that join, that connect circular or cellular elements again in an attitude of integration and embrace; and lines that are unresolved scribbles, evoking internal knots still pending dissolution, indexing what is difficult or still feels heavy.
And so, although the line sometimes begins timidly, it always contains strength and is willing to explore and integrate, almost always dominating and directing the composition.
In the sculptures, these same patterns appear in their volumetric version: knots and volumes of rounded shapes, embracing elements or twisting inward; lines continuing these circular forms, which resolve these knots or contain them, supporting or welcoming them.
• Between the flat and the volumetric
Jessica Stockholder also marked a before and after in understanding my plastic expression. In an interview with Louisiana Channel, she explained how her work is an intersection between pictorial experience and physical experience, and how, although she works with very different objects, everything she does originates from painting.
Objects are used like paint on a palette, not as objects in themselves: they become colors, shapes, or textures... Only, by moving beyond two dimensions, the experience of color and form "jumps" into the tangible, ceasing to be an illusion in the painting to become real. She considers them "things" rather than objects, because they almost completely lose their meaning and become decontextualized.
Exactly the same happens in my sculptural work. Used clothing or found materials completely lose their functionality and meaning. They "speak" exclusively from their material and color properties.
As the pictorial space expands into physical space, scale relationships gain greater importance; in the volumetric, there is no illusion of depth. Size or color are not modulated to "feign" depth; the scale is now 1:1, and colors "weigh" in relation to their real size, the represented size does not interfere to generate this illusion. Thus, if we tried to move from one of the proposed pictorial pieces to the same sculptural one, an identical representation would never occur, because the internal size and color relationships have changed.
The main material used in the sculptural pieces is used clothing, due to its malleable and soft quality, and its ease in evoking adherence to the body, just like something deeply or intensely felt. The fact that they are garments we give a second life to, or sometimes found objects they interact with, is very relevant, because it speaks again of this unconscious intention of integration and embrace.