Lelia Driben

Tema: 
To live under a roof, an accomplishable yearning
Año: 
2009

May the reader imagine a difficult access house, suspended in midair, intangible because it is a house of the memory, or of that previous perception that resists to the wild sketching of a city, with no other destiny than that of sheltering more and more inhabitants; a city that is consumed by every new extension, where the word construction, fatally, must be attributed a dehumanizing synonym. Gloria is an architect and her conceptual and formal corpus is located in the Federal District as a reality devastated by its irregular growth. From that semantic positioning, in which the city is focalized between the layers of a retreated vision, in a metaphysical detour to thread a painful metaphor of betrayed desire. Survival and restitutive gesture; that is the only way to see the beautiful symmetries,  intertwining and rhythms generated by the game of forms and volumes that the observer has before him in this set of ceramic pieces.

Versatile outlines, as if they were  watchmen in the open or millennial resurrections. There are also, arbitrary profiles, similar to uninhabitable environments, open to the symbolism of the other house, that of others, impassable, a displacement of the environment and of that which provides shelter, contains, makes unique. Once more, but at its opposite: it humanizes. Not for nothing did Gloria titled this show “To live under a roof”. This contrasting approach re-dimensions the yearning of housing as a space where the fundamental needs to have and provide shelter is continuously delayed, a stronghold from which uniqueness is possible.

All, or almost all her pieces have doors and windows, minute openings to the restlessness. In these elements, the color black assumes a degenerative condition. A well nourished and accomplished visual combination, the serial linking unwraps the symbolic representation of a overcrowding, where, instead of skin, the smoothness of the clay implies cement.

There are also pieces arranged as a dynamic block, with an abstraction that introduces de fantasy or future time of the fall. And, at an advanced stage of this return to the urban devastation, several acrylic cylinders keep elemental constructions. A slide, a fall without solutions or variations? I do not think so. If the doors to nothing forge a  dialectic between opening and occlusion, Gloria Carrasco makes the intangible tangible and, marked by that tragic tension, her work travels through the findings of a unifying axis, and, in its final section, the light returns and finds the light.