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Memory

Friday, 28 March 2014 16:23 Written by Laura Pomerantz

... (The) art involves concealing the beauty we are able to discover and barely suggesting what one does not dare reveal.

The Tea Book

In the quest to achieve a minimalist atmosphere, Selma Guisande subtly weaves an artistic web, loaded with meanings that wander through a space of universal archetypes and occasionally roam through palpable times, rising together towards a cyclical evolution. Time of times in timeless spaces.

The interplay of materials -ceramics, nails, wire- located in our contemporary walls, recalls that permanent reminder of the oblivion-memory dichotomy in human relations. From pregnancy, woman-man, clan, guiding thread as a metaphor for life to suggesting ethnic and cultural ties.

Signs and codes, fragments of past moments, recovered by the work itself, are projected onto future times. Selma Guisande explores and evokes with great subtlety. She guides us within this space-time framework through a small but consistent portion of pasts - presents/ recovered - forgotten. She reminds us of existential questions driven by visible-invisible networks. Portions of an infinite whose function is to define which unit of measurement should be used by man.   

The balance between the parts reaches its climax. This does not require movement but rather the coordination of pieces inserted into instantaneous, ethereal moments that paradoxically belong to specific time scenes
 that offer the genesis of these fragments. Bodily proposal lacking ornamentation. Themed essence of bodies that rise up, merging their outlines. Minimalist balance of material lightness.

The “less is more” equation proposed by Mies van de Rohe refers to the lower amount of means and greater autonomy of the work to achieve a high level of significance and synthesis following the reduction of elements. The process of artistic representation is considered by offering something like silences within chaos: an attempt to create order after a cleansing thought.

The minimalist quality of Selma’s work contains the essence which, together with empty spaces, invites the viewer to join its intimate nature.

The vacuum is presented in an enhanced form, bumping into the viewer in that remote past, where memory emerges, exposing recollections. The artist therefore acts as a mediating body of lost or found information.

Schematic, synthetic bodies located in games of vertical, horizontal and diagonal figures sometimes penetrate each other, interacting with large white walls.

Opposing materials, interlinking figures, voids that fill the senses, transporting the viewer on the moving rails of a cyclical swing. Ritual evocation of a primitive, postmodern nostalgia, where there is no irony but thoughtful proposals, introspective contemplation and critical awareness.

The postmodern space is therefore created as a meeting place where the audience serves as a trigger of amnesia. This Mexican artist emphasizes universal situations in order to remember them. She retrieves materials that are unrelated to technology, approaching the Italian Arte Povera of the late 1960s and early 1970s by issuing metaphorical statements about everyday life, and emphasizing both the physical presence and the sensitivity radiated by raw material. Thus primary elements combine in an atmosphere of reconciliation of tangible, existential sensations.

Selma Guisande validates popular culture in such a way that it revindicates tradition and offers an artistic product that breaks down the borders between art and life. She also uses a reductionist visual vocabulary that simplifies the understanding gap, at which point she combines the forgetfulness / memory dichotomy with the spatial condition of minimalist aesthetics.

Her motives imply the need for a permanent change while playing musical pieces in unison. Enveloped in the poetics of silence, the revelation emerges: the present recovers the past by completing the incomplete.

Okakura Kakuzo, El libro del té, La ceremonia del Té japonesa(Cha no Yu), Miraguano Ediciones, Madrid, 1996, p. 23
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