Éva Garcia – Can the Light Render
On January 20th, Spazio Nobile Gallery opens an solo show by Éva Garcia titled, “Can this light…? Garcia’s moody, almost ethereal gouaches, engravings and paintings hover between figuration and abstraction, seemingly emerging from their surface as if moving through space. The exhibition is on view through March 27, 2022.
Can the light render
a whole world to us?
Is it rather the fresh
shadow, quivering and tender, that entangles us,
that so resembles us
and turns and trembles about a strange support? Shadows of frail leaves on road and meadow. sudden familiar gesture, that adopts and melds us to a too-fresh clarity.
Rainer Maria Rilke, from: “Orchards”
In a landscape strewn with light and shadows, darkness and clarity, the shapes and volumes engraved and painted in gouache by artist Éva Garcia blend with the paper. The fragility that emanates from her moving work reveals the uncertain and sometimes strange presence of our body and its connection with nature. The “frail leaves” of which Rainer Rilke speaks connect us to this territory that is ours, to this landscape that man builds in a journey towards the other, “on road and meadow” which will offer him a framework and a better understanding of reality. Waiting between two worlds, there is the movement that gives life, the openness and the tracks so well represented by the incursions the artist makes on the paper. With gravure inks she makes impressions, and gouache, appositions on her engravings. The gesture becomes the vital momentum of a soul in search of the other, the silent rock or the dark forest are the personification of time and space inscribed within us.
What is the linchpin that binds us to the world? Like the taproot at the heart of the tree.
The strength, the calm and the storm. Condensation and dispersion.
The man with his back against the rock looks up to the immense sky. Blue.
With her practice based on engraving, Éva Garcia makes use of multiple techniques. Engraving is a reservoir of possibilities. It proceeds from inscription, it penetrates the inversion, it changes, it is a mystery. How can an engraved matrix borrow different existences and constantly renew itself? How can one find the place of the work, its creative vitality, its active silence, this land of the finite and the infinite, where anything can happen? Her art reads like an attempt to perpetuate the emergence.
Éva Garcia questions the notion of narrative and circularity. Her work comprises repeated, transposed and multiple inscriptions, creating a transfer of language. It is not surprising that the artist opens her practice to painting and sculpture.
“I started with engraving, which led me to painting, which led me to sculpture, in a continuous back and forth.” Through this to-and-fro, accumulations of layers, filters, overlaps and discoveries, through these interpenetrations of gestures, techniques and materials, through formats which impose a total investment, we are given an aesthetic of chaos in order to approach the passage from one state to another, from one reality to another, and perhaps to grasp what appears only once before disappearing.
Gouache, reuse of proofs, archetypal shapes that are almost totemic, hesitating between falling and suspension, this is a variation on the theme of the body, between strength and fragility, on the importance of this linchpin of which Rainer Rilke speaks, which allows us to welcome the new day.
Éva Garcia, “Can this light…”, solo show, Spazio Nobile Gallery, Brussels, from January 21 to March 13, 2022.
@evagarcia_art
spazionobile.com
@spazionobilegallery
This article originally appeared in TLmag36: All Is Landscape
Photos courtesy of the artist and Spazio Nobile Gallery
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