Miriam Kaiser

Tema: 
Gloria Carrasco and the urban art
Año: 
2009

The representation of urban art, as such, has become, lately, a subject used by countless visual artists of all ages, all styles, all possible techniques. This is a natural thing, since the artist feels the need to express or account for, most of the times, what surrounds, stimulates, and worries her: her beauties, her nature, her environment, her sorrows, her landscapes and never ending motifs that she perceives and transmits through her particular language.
For this occasion, I am pleased to offer some thoughts regarding the works, performed in high temperature ceramics, by the artist Gloria Carrasco. It is a series dedicated to her interests regarding the topic of cities, where she reflects the massiffication, the superimposition of buildings, that is, what we are currently experiencing regularly in this and many other cities in our country; cities that grow by the minute, disorderly, uncontrolled. Whether it is the satellite cities composed by thousand of small houses that are “born” and grow along all the roads in the country, whether it is the enormous towers – many of them – that appear in “elegant” developments or exclusive neighborhoods in all cities in the country; it appears that, independently of economic means, everyone considers acceptable to live in overcrowding. There are, of course, enormous differences between those swarms of little houses Barkly 60 square meters, built upon fragile walls, but at the same time, each of them flaunting a large cistern, preferably black, and those immense Powers that pretend to emulate those built in the great cities of other countries, and that contain all kinds of satisfier elements, such as sports facilities, gyms, recreational spaces and everything one could think of: none of these characteristics stops it from being a massive habitat.
Gloria Carrasco has ha devoted an important amount of time to working in this series to reflect everything mentioned above, in an abstract, but real manner – and I excuse myself for the implicit discrepancy of this sentence – since, at the same time, she basically “plays” with superimposed forms building some powers that could be or not what we are talking about, personally, I know that this is what the artists pretends to transmit: to fully immerse us, plastically, in this living format already wholly established by the different societies; although, if one desires, they can be beautiful columns, resembling forms perhaps taken from nature, such as the trunk of a palm tree.
I would also like to approach the aesthetic of the pieces themselves, separating them from the concept. The sculptures exhibited in this show are part of a series dedicated to expressing the different constructive forms, as well as the volumes and essences imagined by the artist: not what she wishes would be, but what surrounds her, what she perceives; for instance, when she executes those small encapsulated triangular forms, on one hand, and, on the other, those same or similar forms in a bi or tri dimensional format – if you wish – on top of the installation with which she faces the audience…
These are small and medium format sculptural objects, for which the artist has decided – as in almost all her work – employ one or two colors, that is, try to let the shapes be shown with all their intensity, without any distractions, let their volume, form, their splendid aesthetic be appreciated.
Seen as objects in themselves, seen as urban “mash ups”, as elements that configure one not so hypothetical city, seen as units, or as however each person may interpret them, the ceramic pieces of Gloria Carrasco contain the quality of works of art that, when “adopted”, may be visualized in innumerable manners.
It is a revealing exhibit, where the artist “portrays” the city or the urban areas, the way of living of thousands of people through a personal aesthetic language. In this sense, she invites us to think: is this how we want t olive? Is this/ will this be the – only – solution for the enormous population masses? These are questions that are eventually considered by different specialists, such as urban landscapers, architects, engineers, politicians and many others, but here, we have the concern of an artist.