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PIXELS, THE TRACE OF THE STROKE
Catalogue text by JOAQUÍN SANTO MATAS 2003
Exhibition "ARIADNE'S THREAD-COMBINATORICS" by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES
Municipal Center of the Arts, Alicante. December 12-17, 2003
ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Elche 1949) presents in this exhibition, with work from the series "ARIADNE'S THREAD-COMBINATORICS," her new stage of digital geometry with which she fully enters into experimentation with new technologies. The result is an innovative, rigorous, and coherent language that we can observe in the evolution of her work, whose genesis is found in the realism of her master Antonio López; a realism that Iluminada could continue practicing with agile ability and from which she assimilated measurement and the direct stroke—gesture.
Pablo Picasso said in a brilliant phrase that one must distinguish the painter, who is the one who paints what he sells, from the artist, who is the one who sells what he paints. And Iluminada has not commercialized her work seeking the easy sale; on the contrary, she has altered the Latin aphorism and applies a peculiar primum filosofare, deinde vivere [first philosophize, then live].
Absorbed by the sublime sculpture Ariadne that she painted on two canvases in the Prado Museum, Iluminada García-Torres attempts to untangle her creative ball of yarn to exit the labyrinth of an overwhelming plastic capacity, remembering the thread of that Cretan goddess.
Analyzing the relations of figures in the plane and in space, she drifted toward a geometric abstraction that she would assimilate, almost unconsciously, from the brief classes she received in Madrid from the fellow Alicante native Eusebio Sempere.
The traced lines, executed in a dynamic way, with a single gesture, maintain a relationship of proportionality with space, mathematics and geometry, time and light. And the origin of that continuous spatial tracing must be sought more than a decade ago in her Combinables.
It is for this reason that in her works we contemplate geometries capable of being multiplied infinitely thanks to chromatic combinations and digital processes.
ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES does not hide the connection of her art with technological advances, aware that computer science facilitates experimentation in formats different from the traditional ones. In them, she also uses as a starting point original strokes and gestures articulated in the space of squares that follow rhythmic sequences, which, in this new stage, derive into the digitalization of the gesture, thus constituting pixels as the new structure of the stroke, its trace.
Digital printing is the technique chosen by Iluminada García-Torres in the present exhibition. The results of her work on large-format canvases are surprising in this renewed version of engraving in the third millennium, these canvases being susceptible to continue being painted in successive spontaneous brushstrokes.
This exhibition, belonging to the hundred works that configure the Amérigo Collection, can be contemplated in Alicante at the Hotel of the same name. In this new framework—open or restricted space, fleeting passage, rest, and art—the geometric works of Iluminada García-Torres (what a great name for a painter) will never be mere decorative elements, but will lead us into a world of harmonies fused with Mediterranean light, where celestial and marine blues, earthy and solar ochres, and the violet tones of a dawning on the horizon—which is the line from which all forms emerge—prevail.
JOAQUÍN SANTO MATAS
Director of the Juan Gil-Albert Institute of Alicante Culture
November, 2003
Digital geometric art by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES. Exhibition "Ariadne's Thread-Combinatorics," AMÉRIGO Collection catalogue. Municipal Center of the Arts, Alicante. December 12-17, 2003.
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