Ana Laura Aláez
24 Nov 2009 - 05 Jan 2010
ANA LAURA ALÁEZ
"Form and Performance"
November 24, 2009 - January 5, 2010
It is not easy for me to write about my work in a moment like the present when I am too involved with it to be able to have a more detached perspective. Something so close can only provoke a passionate reflection. I wrote a small statement* last year about one of the works that has become the heart of my first exhibition in the Soledad Lorenzo Gallery. In some ways, that text can be used for the entire collection. I exhibited this work for the first time in the Musac, 2008. These types of works are the ones that emerge from very intense vital pulses, and are almost impossible to carry out with the invisible rules of sculptural language. Many internal struggles are left behind. Other devils come running and attacking. There is always the confrontation between what has been lived and what has been created.
The invisible pulse between art and life.
Sculpture as something autobiographical. Life as inexhaustible artistic material. Sculpture as performance. Uncontrolled repetitions of actions.
At the beginning, you work with a sort of reserved shyness. Gradually you begin to represent more movements. Fearless Lines. Until you strip yourself, slowly, of all your responsibilities. And then when you make decisions the forms begin to acquire almost a magical presence. And this simply gives me a small, well, rather, an enormous sense of freedom. This small achievement –subjective freedom- is what urges me to do what I do. The most interesting aspect is to be able to grant something –that to begin with makes no sense by itself–a value of its own.
Sculpture is a discipline that marks you, or one could say, “that directs you” –where to go... and obviously, where not to go as well. Throughout the entire exhibition there is a noticeable presence: that of the body. Both animal and human. In addition, I use materials and forms that are part of my “personal archaeology”. Memories converted into structures with volume. I am not embarrassed by what I have lived. I even try to extract subliminal ideas from despicable chapters. Opposites coexist side by side. However, by no means, am I trying to state that “everything can be used”.
It is in fact rather the opposite.
Not just in my work, but also in art in general, I like to revise the most elementary concepts of sculpture and performance. The first with defined conclusions, the beauty of form. The second with the action of the moment, the intuition of a perpetrated fact.
When you begin to create a three-dimensional body, you immerse yourself in a ritual where, in order to determine the final result, you abandon many things along the way. Your vulnerability and power are the two main tensions that move you to narrate something. And that is what I like to find in a performative act, and exactly what I try to express in volume.
I understand that the creative process is not just the physical work carried out in order to produce the work. A creative process can be an experience of any type. It can even involve betraying yourself. There is no purity.
I always wonder whether the same internal process will be repeated. I cannot imagine myself accepting again to undertake an invisible plot that forces you to deal with so many abstract things, the ghosts of everyday life. You feel that never again will you be able to approach with the same hope and energy so many aesthetical questions that reveal something about you. Narration with abstraction, doubt with strength, lightness with the present moment, etc, etc. Never again will you face the same mysteries. Never again will you suffer the same ups and downs.
Never again, never ever again, never again... Because everything is very intense.
But then you begin another project and even though the results are obviously going to be different, there are facts that are similar. I am referring to an indescribable structure of pain and of pleasure... in which you cannot avoid immersing yourself once again.
* “HEAD – SPIRAL – HOLE – FIST – SPERM – KNOT”
The installation “HEAD – SPIRAL – HOLE – FIST – SPERM – KNOT” is both a personal appraisal as well as a statement about sculpture being one of the most important foundations of art.
It is made up of six organic forms, abstract, and with almost identical sizes. The jackets have actually been used so the leather is slightly worn, like the hide of a butchered animal, cut open and exposed to the elements, like a crucifixion.
I treat the traditional noble connotations of a bronze with the same importance as the everyday qualities of manufactured leather jackets. Both the hierarchy of the pedestal and sculpture are also treated in an equal way. I have always been interested in the pedestal as an autonomous volume, as a subject in itself. The leather jackets are the “pedestals”, the form from where the sculpture emerges in order to be exhibited with a greater stark effect.
Each work of bronze that makes up this installation is an autonomous sculpture. Their volume in spatial dimensions indicates the volume of six human presences. An imaginary line joins them together in the empty space between them. A line that depicts both absence and presence. It delineates emotional autonomy, the part of the trunk, with the organs that theoretically express feelings: the stomach, the heart... However, the six forms could also be heads. The head is one of the most recurrent themes of representation that I use throughout my career.
“HEAD – SPIRAL – HOLE – FIST – SPERM – KNOT” suggests a latent transgressive message. Specifically, one of reverse gender. It is an autobiographical gesture, made up of live experiences, one which reflects the impossibility of definition, of annotating with rigid barriers concepts like masculine/ feminine. The complete set of the six sculptures has a sharp narrative approach. A statement of how art does not need to be necessarily self-generated. More often it emerges motivated by reasons that are not, by definition, necessarily artistic. In this case, from an act of awareness, an explosion which literally oozes out of the back. It is something that is moulded with experience, far from the isolated scope of the studio.
I wanted to discuss here the emphatic vitality of the form itself, in abstract, but also the impossibility of isolating art both inside safe, sterile bubbles and on white walls.
Ana Laura Aláez
"Form and Performance"
November 24, 2009 - January 5, 2010
It is not easy for me to write about my work in a moment like the present when I am too involved with it to be able to have a more detached perspective. Something so close can only provoke a passionate reflection. I wrote a small statement* last year about one of the works that has become the heart of my first exhibition in the Soledad Lorenzo Gallery. In some ways, that text can be used for the entire collection. I exhibited this work for the first time in the Musac, 2008. These types of works are the ones that emerge from very intense vital pulses, and are almost impossible to carry out with the invisible rules of sculptural language. Many internal struggles are left behind. Other devils come running and attacking. There is always the confrontation between what has been lived and what has been created.
The invisible pulse between art and life.
Sculpture as something autobiographical. Life as inexhaustible artistic material. Sculpture as performance. Uncontrolled repetitions of actions.
At the beginning, you work with a sort of reserved shyness. Gradually you begin to represent more movements. Fearless Lines. Until you strip yourself, slowly, of all your responsibilities. And then when you make decisions the forms begin to acquire almost a magical presence. And this simply gives me a small, well, rather, an enormous sense of freedom. This small achievement –subjective freedom- is what urges me to do what I do. The most interesting aspect is to be able to grant something –that to begin with makes no sense by itself–a value of its own.
Sculpture is a discipline that marks you, or one could say, “that directs you” –where to go... and obviously, where not to go as well. Throughout the entire exhibition there is a noticeable presence: that of the body. Both animal and human. In addition, I use materials and forms that are part of my “personal archaeology”. Memories converted into structures with volume. I am not embarrassed by what I have lived. I even try to extract subliminal ideas from despicable chapters. Opposites coexist side by side. However, by no means, am I trying to state that “everything can be used”.
It is in fact rather the opposite.
Not just in my work, but also in art in general, I like to revise the most elementary concepts of sculpture and performance. The first with defined conclusions, the beauty of form. The second with the action of the moment, the intuition of a perpetrated fact.
When you begin to create a three-dimensional body, you immerse yourself in a ritual where, in order to determine the final result, you abandon many things along the way. Your vulnerability and power are the two main tensions that move you to narrate something. And that is what I like to find in a performative act, and exactly what I try to express in volume.
I understand that the creative process is not just the physical work carried out in order to produce the work. A creative process can be an experience of any type. It can even involve betraying yourself. There is no purity.
I always wonder whether the same internal process will be repeated. I cannot imagine myself accepting again to undertake an invisible plot that forces you to deal with so many abstract things, the ghosts of everyday life. You feel that never again will you be able to approach with the same hope and energy so many aesthetical questions that reveal something about you. Narration with abstraction, doubt with strength, lightness with the present moment, etc, etc. Never again will you face the same mysteries. Never again will you suffer the same ups and downs.
Never again, never ever again, never again... Because everything is very intense.
But then you begin another project and even though the results are obviously going to be different, there are facts that are similar. I am referring to an indescribable structure of pain and of pleasure... in which you cannot avoid immersing yourself once again.
* “HEAD – SPIRAL – HOLE – FIST – SPERM – KNOT”
The installation “HEAD – SPIRAL – HOLE – FIST – SPERM – KNOT” is both a personal appraisal as well as a statement about sculpture being one of the most important foundations of art.
It is made up of six organic forms, abstract, and with almost identical sizes. The jackets have actually been used so the leather is slightly worn, like the hide of a butchered animal, cut open and exposed to the elements, like a crucifixion.
I treat the traditional noble connotations of a bronze with the same importance as the everyday qualities of manufactured leather jackets. Both the hierarchy of the pedestal and sculpture are also treated in an equal way. I have always been interested in the pedestal as an autonomous volume, as a subject in itself. The leather jackets are the “pedestals”, the form from where the sculpture emerges in order to be exhibited with a greater stark effect.
Each work of bronze that makes up this installation is an autonomous sculpture. Their volume in spatial dimensions indicates the volume of six human presences. An imaginary line joins them together in the empty space between them. A line that depicts both absence and presence. It delineates emotional autonomy, the part of the trunk, with the organs that theoretically express feelings: the stomach, the heart... However, the six forms could also be heads. The head is one of the most recurrent themes of representation that I use throughout my career.
“HEAD – SPIRAL – HOLE – FIST – SPERM – KNOT” suggests a latent transgressive message. Specifically, one of reverse gender. It is an autobiographical gesture, made up of live experiences, one which reflects the impossibility of definition, of annotating with rigid barriers concepts like masculine/ feminine. The complete set of the six sculptures has a sharp narrative approach. A statement of how art does not need to be necessarily self-generated. More often it emerges motivated by reasons that are not, by definition, necessarily artistic. In this case, from an act of awareness, an explosion which literally oozes out of the back. It is something that is moulded with experience, far from the isolated scope of the studio.
I wanted to discuss here the emphatic vitality of the form itself, in abstract, but also the impossibility of isolating art both inside safe, sterile bubbles and on white walls.
Ana Laura Aláez