Miguel Angel Muñoz

Tema: 
The fugacity of the earth
Año: 
2011

Art call art through a chain of metaphors that draw the imaginarium of a human community through time, in its sensitive culture. This way, what we understand, with no commitments yet, as artistic tradition is established. I borrow the main idea of these lines from Catalan poet Carlos Barral, and I do it precisely related to the subject and for a reason that I find complementary; given that, in my understanding, it describes simply some of the cardinal motifs that overlap Gloria Carrasco´s recent work. I must also confess that earth and fugacity are two old aesthetic concepts of an open and analytical dimension at the same time that can signal to the eye of the contemporary spectator an inflexion point in the creative maturity of the artist. It is about exposing nature through “la petite sensation”, “chromatic sensations that light unleashes”, and that are the cause of the potent formal abstractions that  single out Carrasco’s sculptures. On the other hand, Carrasco has not been someone who, in her path, has betrayed the structural and intimate principles of her artistic conception, in search of whatever it is that marketing, which stalks us nowadays, dictates, which adds interest and respect for her work.

I have always been intrigued by a circumstantial appreciation by Georg Simmel, the mundane philosopher from Berlin, in a note about landscape published around 1911 and recovered in a selection of his writings titled Philosophical Culture. The philosopher suggested: “The aesthetic impression produced by what is contemplated depends on its shae, but without detriment of other factor that conditions our response: the magnitude, the intensity in which the impression is based”. Form and configuration, form and space, to say it differently, constitute an irreparable unit of aesthetic impression that makes itself perceptible, especially materially, by transporting the natural forms of the landscape to the artwork, to the trenches of ceramics and sculpture. Without a doubt, Simmel is right in his argumentation.

In the loneliness of his study, a completely deaf Beethoven, deep set in misanthropy and an overflowing inspiration, contemplates Goya’s Black Paintings and writes: “I want to be a tree plus a man”. The idea of throwing bridges between earth and human action, of making art a metaphor for the vitality and cosmic force of a small detail of nature, was born with the first romanticism, an “Ode to Joy” of living, which arises after the storm and the negative action of man over its environment. Since then, the artist’s relationship with the landscape has been a coming and going of impressions and expressions. It is as if Carrasco was building a continuous space, without perceptible internal divisions, where the organic world is related with the decorative pictorial world on one side and with the idealized abstract form on the other side.

 

The recent work of Gloria Carrasco has a very close relationship not only with space, but also with time and architecture. For more than two decades of creation, this intimate conversation with these elements has become larger and more complicated, developing not only in all the closed spaces formed by constructed space, but employing all sorts of physical, symbolical and illusionistic resources. In a way, all this indicates that Gloria Carrasco thinks and expresses herself in firm post-vanguardist or post-modern dimension, for which there are not pre-established dimensions of any kind, either material or conceptual. She has used light and color from their most abstract treatment to their most symbolic media. Carrasco is discovered as a maker of the perfect sense of the empty form, that which evokes the illusion of light, which sees in Einstein’s equation the most beautiful form, that which plays with the fixed eye and the moving space, the rigorous – not devout-the artist who is capable of discovering in earth and in the passing of time the enigma, by being able to enchant and over-dimension our sense of space, as in a metaphysical scenario.

To put it simply, Gloria Carrasco has combined an objective reflection over space, with has given it a classical touch. With intimate evocations of memory, on its own subjective, but which she has managed to deepen psychically even more, bordering the territory of personal history with other, deeper and more unconscious levels. She keeps doing so faithfully, but clearly, not in the same way. Now she faces, from a symbolic standpoint, the theme of the earth, which is necessarily the engraved signed of the passing of time, but she again does it through that mysterious crossroad between objective and subjective.

But it is not about her possessing a wide and versatile range, but rather the limits of the traditional arts and genders do not apply to her anymore, what she does is already a mixture of plastic, sculptural and architectural elements and qualities. In this way, reviewing pieces such as Geometries of the earth I & II, 2009, The skin of the earth, 2011, one notices the extraordinary wealth of effects and textures, a material registry of an eviction of mass in favor of space, in which more than that specific physical remain, a new immaterial presence is evident. There, its delicate roughness is present, where the luminous transparency sets and gets its forms, generating a sort of spatial oven, there too, their poetical furrows, as prints of a lost time, but which, at the same time, are a registry of the earth, there, after all, its abstract forms, its fascinating blinds as mysterious holes of light and its spectral shadows, as, for example, in Stalactites, 2011, The Signatures of water,2010, Natural frontiers, 2000, where the clay and the color are joined in the same space. The sense of all this spatial piece cannot, however, cinch itself to the matter of course of a simple game of decorative relationship with architecture, but rather to a way of transfiguring the neutral space of a wall loaded with stories, as if space was, in effect, animated, as if walls were willing to talk.

It is this the form of eloquence that Gloria Carrasco forces, inserting herself in the fold that every wall hides, which is physical, evidently, because a wall separates and communicates two spaces, but that is also a spatial “coverup”, and as such a source of reflexes, transparencies, illusions, images and symbols. All of a sudden, Carrasco shows us the other side of what is real, the potential meaning enclosed by limits and demarcations with which we unrealistically believe we protect ourselves – separate ourselves – from the exterior, without realizing that space is fluid, changeable, moldable; that, definitely, a construction, a lair, is nothing but an interiorized exterior and, as such, a space inhabited by physical and metaphysical ghosts, full of nooks, signs, symbols and illusions. That is the great lesson that Gloria Carrasco teaches us: to discover in the earth, in space, in time, in the prints of memory, the meaning of art.

That is why, when it is said that Carrasco’s ceramics are closely related to architecture and sculpture, there is nothing left to do but accept this evidence, but, above all things, because she shows us that the wall that are mixed with her ceramics, besides listening, also talk, or if you prefer, that having listened to everything, they naturally have lots of things to tell, despite the fact that their eloquence does not rely on sounds, even if they do not disdain then,. I do not think it is necessary to repeat from which tradition, old and new, Carrasco extracts this wisdom, but I believe that in her recent work – The paths of water, 2009; Stele, 2011, are clear examples of that synthesis – she has achieved a set of great force and aesthetic simplicity.

Gloria Carrasco has observed, with that deep look that crosses time, not across, but vertically, those warm events that give meaning to sculptures and transform them in prints of the human ramblings. She shows us with her work the versatile function and rich symbology of folds, the possibility of weaving fragments until we build, from patches, an endless road. Carrasco can, as old ceramists, build very different pieces through creases, but she can also tighten ceramics until she builds unbelievable architectural planes, celestial stairs.

I watch her work with emotion now. I am excited to see that her work can be interwoven with that of weavers that knit masterpieces without any artistic conscience.  I imagine that when her pieces are displayed covering the aseptic environments of a museum, they will produce a profound, complete and transfiguring effect. I imagine they will bring back the color of memory, the sense of habitation, the light of the roads, the throbbing of life, without which art is nothing, or is only a remote reflection of our helplessness, which only becomes more evident. I am excited because, thanks to what Gloria Carrasco does, we are dazzled by a fact infinitely more relevant than art: the beauty of nature, the prints of a volcanic crater, the registry of time. I am excited because that antique beauty is perhaps not completely forgotten.

Beauty is always beyond where we think is is, and, without a doubt, we need to go searching for it. History must be woven, and in between its knots, some truths will be tied. In this never ending excursion with scratches the arid dust of the way, the prints of Gloria Carrasco glisten, givings ceramics back its deepest artistic truth: the line that marks the original meaning of art. And so, it begins again. Her whole group of work reverberates in light of the maturity, which is an adventure without craziness: experience, force, meaning.