Soledad Lorenzo

PELLO IRAZU
"Universo De Suturas"

We work in darkness, we do all that we can, we give all that we have. Our hesitation is our passion and our passion is our work. The rest belongs to the madness of art. JLG

A woman with long hair walks fast surrounding a square chased by a big man carrying a knife. She runs barefoot and with her arms waving like a woman out of a Picasso. After running round the square several times she comes towards where I am standing pursued by the man with the knife. She comes inside the arcade and crouches down on my left side looking for shelter in one corner.

The corner, like sculpture, is the safe place (Beuys and Tatlin in mind), I dwell in that place, a shelter close to my immobility, half open, and half closed. A place for encounter, a groove to protect oneself, a space already occupied that waits for the visitor. Sculpture, like the corner, protects me. From there I can observe, perceive and negotiate reality, for it allows me to flow with the world.
And inside that flow, a challenge: How can I avoid that the (vital, aesthetic...) processes remain hidden? How can I compel language to bring forward the (imaginary) scaffolding allowing me to show myself as I really am: an open entity, a process in constant change, a current?
Sculpture: Choose the moment of crystallization, many moments of crystallization.
The incomplete?

And how can we feel whole in this
universe of sutures,
this tracery of scars? Luce Irigaray


Two black cats, one BIG, one small, curled up in profile. I keep on dreaming. I feed them both with a potato omelette that I’ve found on top of the sink.

How can we recognise the questions? How can we answer them?
Technique. A process by means of which human beings create tools to understand our surroundings, things with which to help solve situations originated by means of our desire, which allows us to feed our need and communicate its eventual satisfaction. But developing a technique also implies a risk: to assume that it can give us answers to each and every one of our questions (style). And yet, souldn’t technique be reinvented each time and for every different occasion? ...The precision of words...
We think that art remains, we remain in art, until we become extinct; however throughout the years there are only a few artists (Tiziano, Rembrand, Godard, Cage, J.Cash...) who have shown any real and long-lived creativity. If this were our ambition, how could we develop a technique of our own that would make it possible to communicate our gaze in all its complexity and in a continuous way?

But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st
So long as men can breath or eyes can see,
so long lives this, and this gives live to thee.
W. Shakespeare

We coexist day by day with the idea of death, of limit, and in spite of HERE and NOW and the idea of NO FUTURE, memory joins us paradoxically with our past –situated with our backs towards the intangible future, the inexorable past reveals itself before our eyes- and I sense that there is still something that pushes us towards transcending the present moment and in that way perpetuating ourselves. I ask myself whether this behaviour is a necessity from which we cannot escape, something inherent to man’s relation with the world through art, or whether it is an unconscious reflection, caused by our persistence to understand the function of art throughout history.
And after all, at the end of everything, why does that emptiness come back? Why does that sensation of abysm repeat itself without being even the slightest bit concerned about your past, your small victories, your certainties, your flights without engine, your jumps without nets?

I ́m what I am, I’m a solitary man
A man who travels alone
Don ́t look at me I will be what I am
A solitary man until you can find me. J. Cash


You will take away the shadow from your tired shoulders,
When you blow out the candle, before going to sleep. J. Brodsky

I follow the narrow stairs by the side of the house. I enter the landing and turning to my left, I come to the main entrance door; in the middle a round door knocker will resounds to announce each visit.
Once inside, a narrow corridor shows me the way: on the right and in front of me, the door of her bedroom for 92 years; slightly before, towards the left, a door opens into the kitchen, a square and tidy room, and before that, facing the entrance, another door guards the living room. Further on to the left lies the girls’ bedroom and to complete the passage, in the dim light the door to a tiny toilet is revealed.
She looks out the window, half open in the kitchen, she can guess from the sound the vehicles in the street outside, she feels the train going pass announcing its presence with its whistle entering and leaving the tunnel,
and her gaze caresses the green and goes up
until it looses itself
inside the border of the landscape.

Do we have to close our eyes to
Imagine
Forget
Remember
Represent?
Does art run out when our ability to surprise and our curiosity disappear, when we are no longer porous and permeable? Saturation and boredom.
In a cyclical way we consume ourselves; and do these small deaths not leave their mark upon us?
Keep the tension up.

Waiting, waiting for that wall which divided us
To be made porous, by your arrival.
For its limits to be crossed, that line of
The horizon temporarily effaced. Luce Irigaray

Two ideas on image, two ideas on art:
Why are the sculptures on the pediment of the Parthenon situated at such a distance carved with such perfection? Why do the figures of the apostles that coronate the entrance to St Peter’s basilica only have their front part defined and in a rough way?
Where does art lie? Where does one find it?
Sculpture is an exercise of activation: spatial, mental, physical and metaphysical. Its importance has nothing to do with what its physical mass occupies, but is related instead with its ability to gain access and activate everything that is not itself, to create a space of connections.
We know your house so very well. Cat power.