EMBODIED IN LIGHT WALLS
In the fifties Jackson Pollock and sixty years later Nuria Guinovart agree that perhaps the act of expressing ourselves is also an art form.
There is no need to reproduce everything we see, in order to realize that our body has nothing to hide or to be afraid of, and therefore be the engine of our feelings representations, the ones that are no longer necessary to retain or kept in secret only to avoid some discomfort. This new type of representation is also art. And it can be called art because it is a subjective expression, not of what we believe or know but of what we feel and get thrilled and excited in reality, this world in which we live in. The brutality of social facts is not decisive anymore, even when they have produced our dismay, because now these facts are not able to provide us with what we need: a sense of joy, sensuality and mental peace altogether. But, we do need social facts, what they are and what everything is made of, because with the reality of the world, which is through everything that surrounds us, we dare to seek our measure and correspondence with the surrounding environment. Each one achieves it with media that is most relevant to one’s identity. Nuria has found that the industrial cement – the one that serves to unite separate elements – is her media, is the one which is more appropriate to capture what boils – who knows why – from her chest, abdomen, head and mouth. She uses Portland cement for her artistic sensitiveness, or other modern variations used to harden and separate the heterogeneity of things, to connect and feel identified with her scratches and cracks, screaming as the weak plaster does it on the wall, but because it is being transformed by a living hand, it remains as an indelible witness.
The concrete plates – as thin as a sheet of paper and supported by the imponderable pore span – with its neutral color offers the artist the right mural surface where she can shape her intentions, concerns, hesitations, firmness, convictions and, above all, her sensitivity. The crackle obtained from a previous treatment of the cement becomes, if the artist makes it takes, an expression of feelings, intentions and memory. It only takes some incisions, also instinctively and intentionally targeted, for the artwork to move us with its own silent speech.
That is the proper role of art.
ARNAU PUIG
Philosopher and art critic
May 2009