Manuel Velázquez
The work of Gloria Carrasco, which forms part of the exhibit “The earth is not flat” can be understood as a derivation of the artistic current known as Minimalism, especially the installations and ceramic objects produced serially in Jalapa’s Anthropology Museum within the setting of the Third International Colloquium of Ceramic Sculpture. However, contrary to the “cold” Minimalism of the sixties, the work of Gloria Carrasco is perceived as “warm”. This warmth, within minimalism, has been operated with the technical instruments or with the strategies of ceramics. That is, the ceramic sculptures of Gloria Carrasco are characterized by her will to annihilate the intense geometric definition or orthodox minimalists. However, her attention to Minimalism in ceramics is not merely casual: it is presented as the result of the work, prevision and knowledge of materials and techniques. In this way, Gloria Carrasco has also turned upside down the anti-formalism of the post-minimalism.
Despite everything, and beyond the circumstances related to the production of ceramic sculpture, the Minimalism in Gloria Carrasco’s work has been constituted as a “procedure” based in abstraction, constructivism and formal reduction; in a series of strategies and methods. According to the character of her proposal, Gloria Carrasco has focused on the procedures that reflect the main criteria of minimalism from a current perspective: the sculptural presence, the structures of simple tendencies, the orders and monumental proportions, the assembly of the works related both to the space and observer, the constructivist anchorage of the shape: simplified spatial compositions, planar chromatic surfaces and modular structures, as well as the mounting materials that come from industrial contexts, such as the mirrors used in “Dunes”.
The work of Gloria Carrasco is founded in visual and plastic relationships, whether they are of a technical nature or merely aesthetic. In her work, the “arguments” take a backseat to the perceptive reality of the ceramic object: the intimate relationship between material, technique and intuition. It is the parallelism between objective plastic laws and the subjective perception from which the artistic conception of Gloria Carrasco is born.
In the old dialectic theorized by Robert Smithson, choosing between pieces for a particular site and others that can be transported, Gloria Carrasco has shown her preference for works that can be installed in different spaces. The category of non site has, therefore, moved to the objectification and special adaptability of the artistic objects. In this way, three possible thematic zones that constitute the work of Gloria Carrasco are identified.
The first one is centered on the specific treatment of the landscape as an object of artistic representation, one where we can locate the emblematic visual exponents in Xalapa, which have been called “landscape-memories”. The second is referred to an aspect of art which is particularly interested in a sort of (re)writing of history that reflects the diachronic and complex character of our peculiar notion of time, highlighting the “juxtapositions and mixtures” that are also so characteristics of our regional environment. The third one refers to those creations that specially potentiate the employment of materials in an artistic doing that interconnects with beneficial harmony, the medullar concepts of time and space.
Therefore, the ceramic objects, sculptures, installations and environmental works of Gloria Carrasco, are derived from the talent and professionalism, and may be bearers of a procedure of deep significance for contemporary ceramic sculpture. According to its own nature, the Third International Colloquium of Ceramic Sculpture strengthens the creative dialogue between local and external artists.