Soledad Sevilla
18 Sep - 18 Oct 2008
SOLEDAD SEVILLA
Recent work
Creation is stimulated by our gaze
Soledad Sevilla
Creation is stimulated by our gaze. Each formal development and each innovation in our way of behaving must be understood as a rupture with what has occurred before, with what has been weakened or automated; then the subconscious turns to the images stored which have made an impact on us at some time. The creative process is triggered when one of those images, which unconsciously hide inside the memory of our gaze, is revived and unfolds itself, and makes sense upon realizing itself, so that it moves us to recognise it once again.
While visiting the recent exhibition of Picasso at the Prado Museum, I admired that mechanics of creation inside which the intellectual process is perceived. Picasso transformed what saw he in his own way. He did not imitate the reality that existed, he used it as a starting point, but he created new things, and in this sense, his art challenges us, always appearing as fresh and disturbing. Under the effects of Picasso’s gaze upon my own gaze, something had been left hanging; so that upon finding those apostles of Rubens, I recognised that thought that was left inside me and I meticulously set out to create something new.
One does not search for the sources, they nearly always appear imperatively.
The new series begins in this way, as a creation that is about contemplation, about the trauma generated by a visual call of appeal.
Out of the twelve apostles that Rubens painted, only eight were exposed. They look in different directions without us knowing why. There is an organic unity about the situation in its totality, but we must also admire it by parts. The figures are practically exempt from the surrounding space, that is deeply dark; they are units that could be extended, or change posture, grow, for there is not a limit that encloses them, even the fact that they are not all exposed reinforces the fantasy of expansion. The discontinuity of the different paintings remains in the superficial level that does not ever compromise the volume in space. Rubens –as Matías Díaz Padrón pointed out- painted those apostles almost as a sculptor, almost demanding the canvas to imitate marble, and it is in that sculptural character of the vestments, where I have centred the focus of my work. However the colour is not less important and the sequence of tunics and capes, with the lights and shades of the folds reaches on occasions the magnificence of precious stones.
I have suppressed the repercussions of the imploring or yearning heads looking towards heaven, with their gaze fixed on the spectator, or absorbed in determined gestures, in favour of an abstraction that is reflected under an imaginary horizontal line, in order to create a wall in which the plasticity of certain objects without history, without canonical or sacred contents, conserves nevertheless the echo of all these expressions of experiences based on history and eternity.
My wish has been to establish a relation between the canvas and the wood, suggested by the transparencies that the painting appears to acquire on the wood panel in these paintings. By juxtaposing contradictory sources, these illusionist conventions of representation have been questioned. The effect of streaking the wood could appear to be narrative, even perhaps somewhat simple or rudimentary, but its apparent literality serves to show that it is nothing more than a trick, since the support is not actually wood here.
This new interpretation does not allow for dialogue, but instead it occupies a space left by the previous one, it grows from that seed that compels me to abandon the cover and dive into a new land of creation, following that that was once sensed by Hölderlin: “Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he thinks”.
Recent work
Carmen González Castro
It is part of a tradition in painting to look for devices which are capable of provoking deceit. Its capability of conjuring, which, since the Renaissance, has incremented with new strategies, can be used to fake credibility in everything that the artist puts forward. What could, on occasions, be easily carried off by other means, is attained through the infinite possibilities of the mimesis of painting, since the painter rarely resigns, to a larger or smaller extent, to use the component of inexplicability that all paintings possess. There are for example a number of experiences that go back to the classical age, like that that Ramón Pérez de Ayala recalls:
Simply as an anecdote I would like to show two texts, by Plinio, about painting and painters. The first refers to a contest, rivalry or competition that Parrasio and Zeuxis had together, to see who was ahead of who. Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes, done with such veracity that the birds tried to eat them. Then Parrasio brought a table covered with a cloth. Zeuxis tried to lift the cloth and discovered that it was done in painting. He had demonstrated and it became clear that Parrasio was a better painter, since if Zeuxis had tricked the birds, he had actually tricked Zeuxis himself. This is where the old, permanent and most extended notion of painting lies, as an optical illusion and deceiving truth1.
At times, the mockery has been so perfect that one can talk about synesthesia, about the possibility of attributing painting to different levels of perception, like a generator of sensations that, by exceeding what is purely visual, has a bearing on the rest of the senses.
This has occurred again today, together with other proposals, after this attitude has been reviled for a long time by each of the vanguards, whose interests were put aside by the faithful imitation of what is visible. After that age came a brief period in which the experiences that had come out of the light of the process of dematerialization of the artistic object not only excluded imagining, but everything related with the tradition of painting itself. The dichotomy between figuration and abstraction – nurtured first by abstract expressionism, and then photorealism -, that obliged one to support one kind of formal option or another, became more flexible after that period, with the symbolic return to painting during the eighties. The traits that distinguished them up until then are used in painting indistinctly at present.
The series of paintings which makes up the central part of the recent works displayed by Soledad Sevilla is a sample of this new situation, in which the exchanges between the artistic disciplines abound, and, as a consequence of this, between different formal options, which are each time more difficult to define, supposing that it was necessary to do so. It is also a sign of trust towards painting as a means, a trust that the prediction of its hypothetical disappearance during the seventies was not able to breach. If it is not possible to confirm the existence of an analogue position at present, it is possible to do so in favour of a predominant attitude, focused on by the institutions and contemporary art centres, that can condition, in a certain way, the artists work. In function of this attitude, painting is partially eclipsed by new languages and inhibited by contributions alien to its own logic, amongst which we must mention the inclusion, through explicit messages, of contents which deal with social type problems. This occurs, in spite of our previous experiences, which from Wassily Kandinsky to Robert Ryman, show that the use of a narrative type of content cannot be considered as a value in artistic terms:
Until well past the eighties, painters looked for, above all, abstraction, in all its honesty, in all its sincerity, in all its conviction. That experience has shown repeatedly that the existence of a narrative content is not a value as such in artistic terms. Even more so if it adopts the character of a Manichean, dogmatic, excessively devout statement, if it abandons the healthy terrain of doubt, the point of Hamlet that is so inherent in so far as language that aspires to be universal in space and in time2.
The works which Soledad Sevilla is concentrating on at present are restricted therefore, to her own field, that of translating the reality that the artist perceives into images; they do not work as propaganda nor are they subordinated to the transmission of a unidirectional message of automatic identification. The series Los apóstoles (The apostles) (2006-2008) is developed from the refinement of her preceding work. The series of windows are inspired by the abandoned trap-net site in El Rompido, a small town on the coast of Huelva, and amongst these those entitled Koan (2006) must be mentioned, as having very direct precedents. By suppressing certain components and thus obtaining the wooden fences that blinded some of those windows, the attention of the paintings moves on towards the ambiguity that arises from the visual deception. The faithful representation of a recognisable element, that of wood, is shown here as being merely anecdotal, since it is simply an instrument used to get a goal that goes beyond its own achievement.
The other origin of this series, from which it has adopted its name, is that of Rubens Apostelado, dating from 1610, that belongs to the Prado Museum. The canvas painted on panels, which form the vestments of the apostles, are the main interest of the artist, which reverses that of Rubens action, by imitating the wood on a canvas:
My wish has been to establish a relation between the canvas and the wood, suggested by the transparencies that the painting appears to acquire on the wood in these paintings. By juxtaposing contradictory sources, these illusionist conventions of representation have been questioned. The effect of streaking the wood could appear to be narrative, even perhaps somewhat simple or rudimentary, but its apparent literality serves to show that it is nothing more than a trick, since the support is not in fact wood here3.
In Los apóstoles, the simulation begins from the choice of the support, that coincides in various points with the physical properties of the fences that serve as a model: in both their dimensions and the flatness of their surface. It is not a trompe l’oeil done in the Baroque tradition, since the referent lacks the necessary volume in order to feign space and three-dimensionality. Instead of that, it recreates its own surface, and its depth coincides with the real depth of the stretcher that holds the canvas. With that, the physicality of the object, that is the picture, is demonstrated. Once its previous functions have been consigned like that of a staging cube or as a plane extended in space –inherited from the renaissance and abstract expressionism respectively-, it blends in with the model to the point in which the visual deception is perfect.
Los apóstoles is articulated in three groups of paintings which can be differentiated by their dimensions, due to the artist’s habit of incrementing the format progressively so that they can be understood as minor, medium and major studies. It is in the larger versions, los apóstoles mayores, (The major apostles) where the dialogue that these works establish with the space in which they are installed becomes the clearest.
The trompe l’oeil is in fact double in this case, since it does not only appear in the substitution of the canvas for the wood, but also in the replacement of the wall for the fence. The behaviour of these paintings together, outlined by the painting of the previous decade, has been developed to the point that it recalls that which Rothko wanted for this own paintings:
Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense (...) By saturating the room with the impact of the painting, this will overcome the walls and the power of each individual work becomes more evident to me4.
At the same time as Soledad Sevilla works in that series of paintings, which work in a similar way to an installation, she conceives Un año de memoria (A year of memory) (2008), her most recent installation, that has appeared, like others, after a meditated pictorial process. In its final phase, the work has adopted as a support the format of video, that is reduced to its most simple unit: the transition of one image towards another that suffers a barely perceptible variation. It is composed of a succession of images that represent phases of the moon, and it connects conceptually with previous works, such as Leche y sangre (1986) or the set of installations which are generically entitled La que recita la poesía es ella (1991-1996), in which the notion of feminine was transformed in a subtle way, to become the main thread. Described in the words of the artist as follows:
This piece contains the 366 moons of 2008; the installation shows us the twelve months of the year in this hyperbole, situated from left to right.
Each three seconds we can see in each of the moons, ordered from January to December in a clockwise direction, the image which corresponds to each day of the month, beginning with the first day.
February has 29 nights, since this year is a leap year, and is the first month which completes its cycle, and waits for those with 30 to complete theirs, and these in turn wait for those with 31, in order to start over again the first day or night of each month, in a continuous loop while maintaining visual constants5.
Like Los apóstoles, Un año de memoria (A year of memory) is a composition that does not formulate anything outside its logic as an image, in spite of its accentuated iconic character. It adopts the cyclic and timeless condition of nature, referring to the minimalist condition that presents itself in a more or less regular way, as has been seen, throughout the artist’s career. A career in constant evolution, without jumps nor starts, which, like Rilke, seems to want to say to us:
(...)So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place6.
Recent work
Creation is stimulated by our gaze
Soledad Sevilla
Creation is stimulated by our gaze. Each formal development and each innovation in our way of behaving must be understood as a rupture with what has occurred before, with what has been weakened or automated; then the subconscious turns to the images stored which have made an impact on us at some time. The creative process is triggered when one of those images, which unconsciously hide inside the memory of our gaze, is revived and unfolds itself, and makes sense upon realizing itself, so that it moves us to recognise it once again.
While visiting the recent exhibition of Picasso at the Prado Museum, I admired that mechanics of creation inside which the intellectual process is perceived. Picasso transformed what saw he in his own way. He did not imitate the reality that existed, he used it as a starting point, but he created new things, and in this sense, his art challenges us, always appearing as fresh and disturbing. Under the effects of Picasso’s gaze upon my own gaze, something had been left hanging; so that upon finding those apostles of Rubens, I recognised that thought that was left inside me and I meticulously set out to create something new.
One does not search for the sources, they nearly always appear imperatively.
The new series begins in this way, as a creation that is about contemplation, about the trauma generated by a visual call of appeal.
Out of the twelve apostles that Rubens painted, only eight were exposed. They look in different directions without us knowing why. There is an organic unity about the situation in its totality, but we must also admire it by parts. The figures are practically exempt from the surrounding space, that is deeply dark; they are units that could be extended, or change posture, grow, for there is not a limit that encloses them, even the fact that they are not all exposed reinforces the fantasy of expansion. The discontinuity of the different paintings remains in the superficial level that does not ever compromise the volume in space. Rubens –as Matías Díaz Padrón pointed out- painted those apostles almost as a sculptor, almost demanding the canvas to imitate marble, and it is in that sculptural character of the vestments, where I have centred the focus of my work. However the colour is not less important and the sequence of tunics and capes, with the lights and shades of the folds reaches on occasions the magnificence of precious stones.
I have suppressed the repercussions of the imploring or yearning heads looking towards heaven, with their gaze fixed on the spectator, or absorbed in determined gestures, in favour of an abstraction that is reflected under an imaginary horizontal line, in order to create a wall in which the plasticity of certain objects without history, without canonical or sacred contents, conserves nevertheless the echo of all these expressions of experiences based on history and eternity.
My wish has been to establish a relation between the canvas and the wood, suggested by the transparencies that the painting appears to acquire on the wood panel in these paintings. By juxtaposing contradictory sources, these illusionist conventions of representation have been questioned. The effect of streaking the wood could appear to be narrative, even perhaps somewhat simple or rudimentary, but its apparent literality serves to show that it is nothing more than a trick, since the support is not actually wood here.
This new interpretation does not allow for dialogue, but instead it occupies a space left by the previous one, it grows from that seed that compels me to abandon the cover and dive into a new land of creation, following that that was once sensed by Hölderlin: “Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he thinks”.
Recent work
Carmen González Castro
It is part of a tradition in painting to look for devices which are capable of provoking deceit. Its capability of conjuring, which, since the Renaissance, has incremented with new strategies, can be used to fake credibility in everything that the artist puts forward. What could, on occasions, be easily carried off by other means, is attained through the infinite possibilities of the mimesis of painting, since the painter rarely resigns, to a larger or smaller extent, to use the component of inexplicability that all paintings possess. There are for example a number of experiences that go back to the classical age, like that that Ramón Pérez de Ayala recalls:
Simply as an anecdote I would like to show two texts, by Plinio, about painting and painters. The first refers to a contest, rivalry or competition that Parrasio and Zeuxis had together, to see who was ahead of who. Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes, done with such veracity that the birds tried to eat them. Then Parrasio brought a table covered with a cloth. Zeuxis tried to lift the cloth and discovered that it was done in painting. He had demonstrated and it became clear that Parrasio was a better painter, since if Zeuxis had tricked the birds, he had actually tricked Zeuxis himself. This is where the old, permanent and most extended notion of painting lies, as an optical illusion and deceiving truth1.
At times, the mockery has been so perfect that one can talk about synesthesia, about the possibility of attributing painting to different levels of perception, like a generator of sensations that, by exceeding what is purely visual, has a bearing on the rest of the senses.
This has occurred again today, together with other proposals, after this attitude has been reviled for a long time by each of the vanguards, whose interests were put aside by the faithful imitation of what is visible. After that age came a brief period in which the experiences that had come out of the light of the process of dematerialization of the artistic object not only excluded imagining, but everything related with the tradition of painting itself. The dichotomy between figuration and abstraction – nurtured first by abstract expressionism, and then photorealism -, that obliged one to support one kind of formal option or another, became more flexible after that period, with the symbolic return to painting during the eighties. The traits that distinguished them up until then are used in painting indistinctly at present.
The series of paintings which makes up the central part of the recent works displayed by Soledad Sevilla is a sample of this new situation, in which the exchanges between the artistic disciplines abound, and, as a consequence of this, between different formal options, which are each time more difficult to define, supposing that it was necessary to do so. It is also a sign of trust towards painting as a means, a trust that the prediction of its hypothetical disappearance during the seventies was not able to breach. If it is not possible to confirm the existence of an analogue position at present, it is possible to do so in favour of a predominant attitude, focused on by the institutions and contemporary art centres, that can condition, in a certain way, the artists work. In function of this attitude, painting is partially eclipsed by new languages and inhibited by contributions alien to its own logic, amongst which we must mention the inclusion, through explicit messages, of contents which deal with social type problems. This occurs, in spite of our previous experiences, which from Wassily Kandinsky to Robert Ryman, show that the use of a narrative type of content cannot be considered as a value in artistic terms:
Until well past the eighties, painters looked for, above all, abstraction, in all its honesty, in all its sincerity, in all its conviction. That experience has shown repeatedly that the existence of a narrative content is not a value as such in artistic terms. Even more so if it adopts the character of a Manichean, dogmatic, excessively devout statement, if it abandons the healthy terrain of doubt, the point of Hamlet that is so inherent in so far as language that aspires to be universal in space and in time2.
The works which Soledad Sevilla is concentrating on at present are restricted therefore, to her own field, that of translating the reality that the artist perceives into images; they do not work as propaganda nor are they subordinated to the transmission of a unidirectional message of automatic identification. The series Los apóstoles (The apostles) (2006-2008) is developed from the refinement of her preceding work. The series of windows are inspired by the abandoned trap-net site in El Rompido, a small town on the coast of Huelva, and amongst these those entitled Koan (2006) must be mentioned, as having very direct precedents. By suppressing certain components and thus obtaining the wooden fences that blinded some of those windows, the attention of the paintings moves on towards the ambiguity that arises from the visual deception. The faithful representation of a recognisable element, that of wood, is shown here as being merely anecdotal, since it is simply an instrument used to get a goal that goes beyond its own achievement.
The other origin of this series, from which it has adopted its name, is that of Rubens Apostelado, dating from 1610, that belongs to the Prado Museum. The canvas painted on panels, which form the vestments of the apostles, are the main interest of the artist, which reverses that of Rubens action, by imitating the wood on a canvas:
My wish has been to establish a relation between the canvas and the wood, suggested by the transparencies that the painting appears to acquire on the wood in these paintings. By juxtaposing contradictory sources, these illusionist conventions of representation have been questioned. The effect of streaking the wood could appear to be narrative, even perhaps somewhat simple or rudimentary, but its apparent literality serves to show that it is nothing more than a trick, since the support is not in fact wood here3.
In Los apóstoles, the simulation begins from the choice of the support, that coincides in various points with the physical properties of the fences that serve as a model: in both their dimensions and the flatness of their surface. It is not a trompe l’oeil done in the Baroque tradition, since the referent lacks the necessary volume in order to feign space and three-dimensionality. Instead of that, it recreates its own surface, and its depth coincides with the real depth of the stretcher that holds the canvas. With that, the physicality of the object, that is the picture, is demonstrated. Once its previous functions have been consigned like that of a staging cube or as a plane extended in space –inherited from the renaissance and abstract expressionism respectively-, it blends in with the model to the point in which the visual deception is perfect.
Los apóstoles is articulated in three groups of paintings which can be differentiated by their dimensions, due to the artist’s habit of incrementing the format progressively so that they can be understood as minor, medium and major studies. It is in the larger versions, los apóstoles mayores, (The major apostles) where the dialogue that these works establish with the space in which they are installed becomes the clearest.
The trompe l’oeil is in fact double in this case, since it does not only appear in the substitution of the canvas for the wood, but also in the replacement of the wall for the fence. The behaviour of these paintings together, outlined by the painting of the previous decade, has been developed to the point that it recalls that which Rothko wanted for this own paintings:
Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense (...) By saturating the room with the impact of the painting, this will overcome the walls and the power of each individual work becomes more evident to me4.
At the same time as Soledad Sevilla works in that series of paintings, which work in a similar way to an installation, she conceives Un año de memoria (A year of memory) (2008), her most recent installation, that has appeared, like others, after a meditated pictorial process. In its final phase, the work has adopted as a support the format of video, that is reduced to its most simple unit: the transition of one image towards another that suffers a barely perceptible variation. It is composed of a succession of images that represent phases of the moon, and it connects conceptually with previous works, such as Leche y sangre (1986) or the set of installations which are generically entitled La que recita la poesía es ella (1991-1996), in which the notion of feminine was transformed in a subtle way, to become the main thread. Described in the words of the artist as follows:
This piece contains the 366 moons of 2008; the installation shows us the twelve months of the year in this hyperbole, situated from left to right.
Each three seconds we can see in each of the moons, ordered from January to December in a clockwise direction, the image which corresponds to each day of the month, beginning with the first day.
February has 29 nights, since this year is a leap year, and is the first month which completes its cycle, and waits for those with 30 to complete theirs, and these in turn wait for those with 31, in order to start over again the first day or night of each month, in a continuous loop while maintaining visual constants5.
Like Los apóstoles, Un año de memoria (A year of memory) is a composition that does not formulate anything outside its logic as an image, in spite of its accentuated iconic character. It adopts the cyclic and timeless condition of nature, referring to the minimalist condition that presents itself in a more or less regular way, as has been seen, throughout the artist’s career. A career in constant evolution, without jumps nor starts, which, like Rilke, seems to want to say to us:
(...)So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place6.