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The immense risk of setting out across the waves
Text by Rosa Martínez de Lahidalga. 1990
exhibition, oil paintings/canvas by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES
Galería ALBATROS, MADRID 1990
"No utility can legitimate the immense risk of setting out across the waves. To set sail, there have to be weighty interests involved. But truly weighty interests are the most chimerical."Gaston Bachelard
Across the waves. Across the spaces created to magnify silence, the passion of absence or abnegation. ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b.Elche 1949 Spain) constructs the edifice of being from the work of being. In her painting, we find the morphology she is obliged to provide for this edifice. This is the role that has been reserved for artists and poets.
Ariadne does not drown herself in the sea in desperation, as some versions of the myth would have us believe. Ariadne, the guiding light, the discloser or guardian of the mystery emerges from the depths of the ocean in serene peace. Thus we find her, stretched out over the rocks, a perfect example of classical, eternal antiquity in sculpture.
This is the Ariadne of the Prado Museum, which Velazquez brought from Rome for his king and whom he painted in his two magnificent paintings of Villa Medici, and this is the Ariadne who has captured Iluminada's imagination with her spell and led her through her own personal labyrinth. Her fascination lies in the symbol she contains, which works its own seduction, wherever the image may be. And Iluminada's painting also seduces using values that are apparently out of favour nowadays, such as exactitude, authority and tradition, which she unites with an unmistakable gift for visual and three-dimensional expression.
It is impossible when standing before her work to remove oneself from these categories, the intensity and association that is so far removed from the time-space dimension. The sculptural material becomes more real and more human than the form that contains it, whilst the colour vacillates between warmth and chill in search of a welcoming abyss. This is an aureate Ariadne, as distant and as close as a poetic dream, a figure whose mystery is so much greater than those immersed in the monumental tragedy of human centuries.
The artist interrogates the past from a very personal angle, moving in the delicate area that separates waiting from own experience. In this space, she has shed light upon the dividing line, affirming certainties whilst also taking one off on incredible flights of imagination.
All artworks are of infinite loneliness, as Rilke once said, and there is no way one can reach them through criticism. Only love can capture them and hold them as they should be held. This is what happens with these almost muralesque pictures which —probably unintentionally— belong to the metaphysical line passed down from Chirico, whose gaze was always fixed on the never-forgotten classicism of Italy. Behind the unnervingly frozen appearance, between steel tubes and cases, Iluminada recovers an entire metaphysics of space and form, a mutation of structural architecture in the articulation of reinvented columns through which light and thought flow.
One can make the simplest image, the smallest object achieve transcendence if the paintbrush and the mind are able to elevate them to the level of category. This is what occurs with these open yet hermetic cases and these blind bottles that mirror reflectant realities. Within them lie jealously guarded codes.
Those of us who know of Iluminada’s human testimony, which reveals a soul born to art, have been stunned by the beauty of these surfaces. Although beauty seems to have been devalued over the last few years, at this stage of the century it has now become evident that nothing related to art is evident. However, it is still considered art’s job to discover the need for law and order in the apparently irrational world of our experience. There can be no doubt that the reason it is so impossible to define art is that it will always be predetermined by what once was but will always acquire legitimacy only by what wishes to be or perhaps could be.
When one stands before this great set of pictures, one cannot speak of the possibility of being. All this constitutes an authentic definition that needs no name other than its own. Stealing Hölderling's words, I would be bold enough to venture the prayer that bursts forth from such diaphanous works:
"May our heart, like that of the child,
endeavour to be pure and our hands clean of any fault
and supreme in its trembling, uniting suffering
to the pain of this God, may the eternal heart
remain eternally firm."
Text by Rosa Martínez de Lahidalga 1990
Member of the Spanish Association of Art Critics
English version: Victoria Hughes
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