ART REVEAL: ENTREVISTA a ALMUDENA BLANCO

When, how and why started your art practice?

I started to paint in the fall of 2011. I was living in San Francisco (California) by then, and after a couple of years of working in creative projects through the use of drawings and sculptures, I decided to take painting classes at the university. I was working at that time as TV correspondent in the USA for a Spanish television. It had been already a long time of dissatisfaction because of what I was doing to earn a living, as well as a sense of emptiness because I was not confronting my desire to make art my main activity. So finally it happened. I could not avoid it. After taking those painting courses at UC Berkeley I have not stopped painting.

What is your creative process like?

I mentally play with two or three ideas for months. Typically they turn out to be concepts related to human behavior (people’s true expression, fears, attitudes). Soon these concepts start to find an answer through a esthetic representation: I play with canvases and colors in my mind before actually going to my studio. Then I start painting and the physical process comes along with this mental, visual act of my mind that stays with me till I finish the painting or the group of paintings that I need to make in order to find the right answer. The whole process is about reflecting and acting. It is magic.

In your opinion, what does art mean in contemporary culture?

Art means everything in our contemporary visual culture. Art does happen to be the structure where design, fashion and advertisement lean on. That means that any visual aspect of our culture finds its root in painting, photography, art installations, performances and video art. Their very own ways to use color, composition and movement end to be the base of our contemporary esthetic.

Name three artists you admire.

Cy Twombly, Georg Baselitz, Isa Genzken.


How would you describe the art scene in your area?

I am now living and working in Bilbao (Basque Country, Spain). This area is welknown for its tradition in sculpture. Artists as Eduardo Chillida and Jorge Oteiza were born here, and you can tell that still the main contemporary manifestations of art in this region happen around sculpture. This is good and bad. The good part is the high quality standard of these art references. The bad part, however, is that young artists in the area may be avoiding to look abroad more, to the international art scene. Fortunately, the Guggenheim Museum works out as an antidote for that. This institution has meant a lot in the openness of the city to the rest of world: the art scene now knows where Bilbao is, and also people here knows there is more art taking place abroad and that it is worth it to look at.

What advice can you give to those who are just starting out in the arts?

I encourage them to be real, to try the authentic without fear. I believe that is the only way to build an art career that makes sense, as well as, the only way to really grow up while making art. Actually there is nothing to lose and a lot to win with this attitude, although our more conservative and protective subconscious structures sometimes tend to place us in a different scenario. It is difficult to sell pieces of art so it happens very often that artists are more focussed in making something trendy and likeable than real. I personally think that that is a mistake. That may turn them just into “cool things” creators more than into creators of knowledge.

What are your future plans?

I am now focused in my new series of paintings. I am working in the analysis of “less as enough”. Playing with the use of different materials, as well as with the reference in my paintings to elements coming from different art movements, I am trying to say everything it is needed to be said without going too far in the expression, neither stay short. I am also exploring through these pieces the work in big format canvases. These works will be also used to attend to my future exhibitions in Venice, Basel and NY, this year.

FRANCIS BACON DICE ADIÓS A BILBAO por Almudena Blanco

FRANCIS BACON DICE ADIÓS A BILBAO (Almudena Blanco)

El Museo Guggenheim de Bilbao da la bienvenida al nuevo año despidiendo una de sus

exposiciones más potentes de los últimos tiempos. La muestra Francis Bacon: de Picasso a Velázquez, resulta ser una revisión extraordinaria de la obra del artista irlandés, Francis Bacon (Dublín 1909 – Madrid 1992), sustentada en la estrecha relación que siempre existió entre el pintor y nuestro país.

Su fascinación por Picasso, Velázquez y Madrid son elementos bien conocidos para todos

aquellos que amamos su obra. Y al menos en los dos primeros casos, la exposición que se cierra este próximo día 8 de enero en Bilbao logra poner este hecho de manifiesto. La muestra cuenta con unas cincuenta obras de Bacon a las que hay que unir una treintena de cuadros de otros artistas clásicos que influyeron en su devenir creativo. Bajo las salas cubiertas de titanio del más emblemático edificio de Bilbao, obras de Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque y el mismísimo Diego Velázquez nos invitan a reflexionar sobre la evolución y los fundamentos de Bacon.

Considerado uno de los artistas más revelantes y carismáticos del siglo XX, la exposición revisa toda su vida lo que nos permite intuir los momentos más amables y también los menos dulces en la existencia del creador. La década de los setenta se nos revela como la más colorista en la trayectoria de Bacon. Cuadros de fondo rosado, verde menta y azul turquesa nos invitan desde la sala dedicada a este periodo a respirar dulzura y coger aire para afrontar la magnificencia pero también la oscuridad que se evidencia en la mayor parte de la exposición. El sufrimiento, la autotortura existencial del individuo, la alusión a lo animal por encima de lo humano, la descripción sintética de los espacios y su recreación en lo visceral y profundo, son algunas de las principales señas de identidad de su producción artística, una producción artística prolífica y brillante.

En un ejercicio didáctico muy bien elaborado, la exposición planteada por el Museo Guggenheim muestra cómo el irlandés alcanza su madurez pictórica en la cuarentena y cómo desde entonces incide una y otra vez y sin descanso en la investigación de lo humano en movimiento. Sus figuras giradas en una acción retorcida y netamente presente en el instante, representan una vuelta de tuerca brillante a la multiperspectiva heredada del cubismo. Siempre ubicadas en habitaciones vacías, el pintor reflexiona sobre lo humano dentro de espacios someros, creados por el hombre y desprovistos de cualquier latido natural.

El irlandés estuvo casi obsesionado con la pintura del Papa Inocencio X de Velázquez. Llegó a efectuar hasta cincuenta versiones de esta obra, dos de las cuales están incluidas en la muestra.

Bacon, además de admirar a Velázquez por su implicación con la técnica pictórica, recoge los tintes sarcásticos y oscuros que desprenden las obras del genio sevillano menos cortesanamente correctas. Bajo los techos del Museo Guggenheim de Bilbao duerme desde el pasado 30 de septiembre la pintura de Don Sebastián de Mora (1645) de Velázquez, quien es retratado por el maestro andaluz con el respeto que se profesaría a un monarca a pesar de ser en realidad, y únicamente, el bufón de la corte real. Servicial, sometido, obligado, pero también libre en el espacio sin forma en el que Velázquez lo ubica, como Bacon hace con sus figuras, y desde el que nos dice con su mirada directa y profunda que él es, fundamentalmente y sobre todas las cosas, un hombre.

El museo está repleto estos días. Es difícil pasar de largo por delante de esta exposición cuando ya el olor a su final inunda los alrededores del edificio de Frank Gehry.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS by ALMUDENA BLANCO

A colación de que seguimos teniendo aquí en Bilbao la exposición de esta artista, os copio el acercamiento a esta artista por parte de Almudena Blanco.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Louise Bourgeois passed away at the age of 98 years in May of 2010 and she kept on working until one week before that happened. This small detail is an extraordinary example of how this bright and genuine woman conceived and experienced art expression like: it was the basic vehicle for her to get through the emotional rapids of life, and also death.
Bourgeois belongs to that category of artists for whom art creation becomes that only possible way of safely getting through daily life. In her case, particularly, the creative practice becomes that second opportunity for her to process the unapproachable, and as a result of that her art pieces ooze a very characteristic type of emotionality: one that reveals in the surface the roughness derived from confronting the uncomfortable, but which does have its origin in the sensitive delicacy of whom was not able to deal with the toughness of the first shove.
Marked by a traumatic childhood, Bourgeois’ work was hardly influenced and based in the deep, strong and non-processed emotions that her father’s tyranny and the presence of his mistress in the family home during 10 years caused to her. As she repeatedly manifested during her life, she never achieved to resolve her childhood experience of male-female relationships and those experiences, and the emotions derived from them, became the foundation where her creative spirit emerged from: the subject of her subsequent life as a sculptor.
In The Destruction of the Father (1974) she explores the exasperation and terrifying feelings present in the memories about her father; through her famous series of Spiders, begun in the late 90s, she deepens in the image of her mother and the relationship with her; in Fillette (1968) she reflects on men fragility and the protection needed by what she names as “male delicacy”. At this respect her role as wife, mother and, essentially, woman, is in detail confronted. Even her Insomnia Drawings are an extraordinary exemplification of how art was present in every instant of Bourgeois’ life needed of assimilation or confrontation.
These pieces turn to be the final product of a process defined by the understanding, assimilation and transformation of the emotions pervading her life. This is the way she used her practice for and, as a reflection of that, process and the product of that process itself are the relevant elements of her artistic expression.
As Bourgeois said, the medium was secondary to her: “the wish to say something antedates the material”. This does not mean that materials were not important to her, but that this element in the global scenario of her creation was, clearly, in a secondary screen.
While during the 60s and 70s other contemporary artists were exploring the possibilities of new materials in fine arts, Bourgeois was devoted to trace her own path in a very much personal, individual, and even independent way. In 1967 Bourgeois started to make trips to Italy with the purpose of deepening in the use of marble and bronze.

She did try the use of, for example, latex as in Fillette (1968) and, later in her career, once she may have felt less pressure to prove herself, she did use sewing as a medium for making sculpture as in Seven in Bed (2001) or Couple (2001). But in essence, Bourgeois swam against the tide in terms of the use of materials. Durable elements became the base her sculptures were made of and, essentially, her own personal discovery was once again the core of her work, unlike the playing-with-materials tendencies of many of the twentieth century avant- gardes.
It is actually not easy, and maybe not even possible, to classify Bourgeois’ work as belonging to a concrete tendency or art movement.
This French artist moved to the United States when she was 27 years old and confronted since then the sort of collage represented by the collection of art movements placed from the end of the 40s onwards. Bourgeois’ eyes witnessed, among others, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Post Minimalism, New Realism and Postmodernism.
While other artists were exploring the last consequences of these new tendencies in art, Bourgeois was, once again, focused in the study of her own emotions and circumstances which basically is equivalent to say she chose confronting universal and basic feelings versus diving in the possibilities of the new art movements. This may be one of the causes why Bourgeois’ work was pretty much invisible until the “Louise Bourgeois Retrospective” exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum of New York in 1982. She was not interested in working on what was tendency at every different decade. She was focused on the work of what was important and relevant in her life. Even this could not prevent this artist to become an icon for the feminist movement or a determinant artistic reference during the 80s. The postmodern artistic climate lived by that decade was one in which the personal and narrative were seen as important elements in art practice and Bourgeois, by then in her seventies, finally spoke out.
From this period onwards Bourgeois’ work primarily manifests itself in a bunch of different installations that talk about passages of her life. Her work becomes, if possible, more narrative and specific about the moments of her life that are being represented. Belong to this period her Cell series (1989-93), the Red Room (1994) or the Passage Dangereux (1997), among others.
Bourgeois expressed in many occasions that it was really anger what made her work, pointing out that making sculptures was her way to transform ugliness in love.
A very prolific artist, responsible of having made some of the more relevant pieces of the last 100 years, Bourgeois most important contribution has been, however, her example of coherence with her inherent natural necessity of working as an artist.
In Bourgeois’ own words, art is a guaranty of sanity. In my words, her work is a mirror of honesty and also help to sanity for the rest of us.