Carlos Aranda Márquez

In 1975, Italo Calvino was an Italian writter who began to acquire fame in the demanding anglo-saxon world. An article by Gore Vidal in the New York Times
Magazine consecrated him next to our Jorge Luis Borges as one of the authors of a new fantastic-intellectual tradition in the West. Víctor Gollancz, an English literary editor, decided to present the Italian intellectual in the British Islands, with one of his most recent novels, which had been a huge success in Italy, France and Spain.
In 1975, London was a city that lived of the memory of its intense Swinging Sixties, rainy and cold and in the vertex of a terrible economic decay. Any poor, foreign student didn’t have many options of what to do in such a physical, moral climate. Drug themselves and attend bad rock concerts or lead a monk’s life and devote themselves to reading and locking themselves in their own world. After reading Under the Volcano, the hellish novel by Malcolm Lowry, the second novel I read in English was paradoxically written by a Latin American author, who, on second though, could have been my literature professor in university.
It is not hard to see why Las Ciudades Secretas captivated its readers. Halfway between its description of oriental cities and a certain plot of mystery, one could explore a new world, and if I evoke that melancholy is because the most recent exhibit by Gloria Carrasco, which we can now observe in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (Oaxaca’s Museum of Contemporary Art) gives back that clear memory of the night, the wind and the desert sand.

Two
Architect by profession and artist by calling, Gloria Carrasco chose to give a new meaning to the use of ceramics as an intimate and warm three-dimensional language. One is able to discover the lascas that guide her work and we can divide her vocabulary in three main courses.

The first and strongest of the three is related to the creation of habitats and environments and we can gather here her tour groups as trees, vestiges, rituals and silhouettes as urban elements that  strongly showcase the interrelation among them and and allow us to clearly imagine the invisible city.
The second group is formed by four two dimensional pieces that do not try to explore a pictorial metier, but that suggest the signs laid by the nocturnal lights in a great city or the games of children in the beach. Diálogo brings an Oriental air to us, half the way between the strategy for Go, the Japanese game, and the textures of some painters from Oaxaca.
Finally, two unclassifiable pieces form a natural arc between the modern pieces, the larger part of the exhibit, and the contemporary works, made by a Nadin Ospina and other South American masters. Resonancia brings to mind the command batons of the colombian artist, where the mesoamerican world is reinterpreted and the weight of tradition acquires new meaning among us.
Ceremonial is the most enigmatic piece of the exhibit. An ancient monument, a contemporary sculpture, a shy homage or all at the same time, the work looks at us like the eye of Tezcatlipocatl, from the beginning of fire to the serene contemplation.