Omar Gasca

Tema: 
The landscape as a process: astonishment. The work of Gloria Carrasco
Año: 
2017

However old it may be, the idea remains valid: "philosophy begins with astonishment", a phrase that appears at the beginning of Aristotle's Metaphysics and refers to the fact that without astonishment there is no possible conclusion about the phenomena that are presented to us. Art also begins with astonishment but, if it were not so, it would be enough to recognize that every artist (real, it is worth saying), is also a philosopher. Astonishment is a sensation, a state or feeling that affects Gloria Carrasco and that is decanted when, as a keen observer of nature, she appreciates in it the geomorphological characteristics, the effects of meteorological phenomena and the changes that in that context man produces.

Observation, astonishment, reflection, reinvention of lived experience, cause-effect relationships, conceptual elaboration and formal creation allow this author to construct the inter-subjectivity that involves that nature, herself, the work and the viewer, through of a successful semiosis, that is to say of a process that develops in the mind of the interpreter and that finalizes in an effective constitution of signs, in this case referred to another way of creating landscape ─from, in and with ceramics─, signs that evoke the expressive force of nature, its structures, its mutations and, it would be said, even its vagaries.

Two themes, two concepts so remote and recurrent, pottery and landscape, thanks to a kind of fusion of codes, are put by Carrasco in a different relationship, which renews the pretexts, the text and the context, thus favoring, also, the making a different subtext, that is, that set of nuances that do not respond to literality, that are not announced openly, that cannot be seen at first but are implicit in the work and are understandable or discernible to the competent viewer.

To all this we must add the thenic, the impeccable trade, the modesty with which this work is presented, this project, which undoubtedly deserves in this city an attentive participation of the look, the touch and, again, the astonishment.