
Gallery Façade. Both forests Exhibition. September 2021.

Exhibition view.

Untitled. 146 x 114 cm. Acrylic on canvas.

Exhibition view.

Exhibition view.

Untitled. 96 x 90 x 15 cm. Aluminum and car paint.

Sin título. 195 x 130 cm. Acrylic on canvas.

Exhibition view.

Exhibition view.

Sin título. 146 x 114 cm. Acrylic on canvas.

Exhibition view.

Exhibition view.

Exhibition view.

Sin título. 162 x 48 x 8 cm. Aluminum and car paint.

Exhibition view.

Exhibition view.

Sin título. 119 x 25 x 9 cm. Aluminum and car paint.

Exhibition view.

Sin título. 160 x 230 cm. Acrylic on canvas.

Exhibition view.

Sin título. 195 x 130 cm. Acrylic on canvas.

Exhibition view.
Information
Both forests
September 9 to November 13, 2021
The Latin literary tradition gives the name of silva to a type of poetic composition defined by both its unfinished nature and the heterogeneity of its materials. In the literal sense, the word silva means the woods, and, by extension, wood; in turn, it is part of a constellation of metaphors connected to raw, unchanged materials, and construction materials. Silva translates, also, the Greek term hýle, a concept that philosophers save for a special kind of matter. In his Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville points out that, for Greek thinkers, hýle is ‘some type of first matter that is yet to form, but it is able to admit all the shapes, and of which all the visible elements are formed.” It is necessary to think the notion of hýle not as a substance or substrate but as a matrix where different material processes take place and from which things and bodies emerge. Latin poets gave the name of silva to this absolute power that demands to become matter and reminds them the constant transformation of the woods into wood.
Both forests is the title of Elvira Amor’s first solo exhibition at Galería MPA / Moisés Pérez de Albéniz. Rather than describing a theme or a motif, the title evokes through the sonority of the words a certain environment, the feeling of a place. The exhibition brings together a selection of her latest work and opens outside the gallery with a mural on the façade. The mural acts literally as a true prelude of the exhibition, introducing, in a synthetic way, some of the fundamental questions that her work continually examines since almost a decade ago. One of these questions is the relationship between shape and meaning. Shape is understood here as a fragile and ambiguous area located between linguistic structures and random strokes, amongst bodies and geometrical figures, an open space by not knowing that, consequently, it requires some type of apprehension that does not reduce the meaning to something already known. Opposite the mural, or opposite any of the artworks of the exhibition, the viewer gets access to a type of experience not only difficult to articulate in words, but impossible to exhaust. The pre-verbal nature of this experience allows us to momentarily put on hold the certainties and reasons that guide our everyday life and get a glimpse of other ways of thinking and feeling. In the end, through the codes of abstraction, the painting of Elvira Amor questions itself about the experience of being in the world, being a body among bodies, about change and metamorphosis. From these general questions, secondary ones emerge, like the relationship between knowledge and perception, the nature of the visual experience or the limits of painting.
Elvira Amor paints directly on unprimed canvas fabric, with no studies or sketches, so every painting is a complete record of her process. Furthermore, she started applying the acrylic without priming the fabric, the color soaks and dyes the fibers of the fabric, becoming one with it. In her work, this technique has a double genealogy, on one hand, the hand-dyed traditional fabrics of Indonesia (batik), where the artist began her training, and, on the other hand, the use that the modern pictorial tradition makes of the unprimed fabric from Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler. The unprimed fabric, generally in different shades of white, becomes in these works a chromatic valence among others, while keeping its untouched-space nature, a negative. In Elvira Amor’s paintings, the unprimed fabric plays an essential role since it establishes different types of tensions between the shapes and the support. Among the composition models she has used throughout the years, two become the standouts: firstly, the displacement of the pictorial shapes to the margins with the purpose of leaving the center of the painting free of paint, a strategy that usually has the motif of a cropped egg shape whose origin is found in the displacement of the vertical of the painting towards the horizontal; secondly, a close framing that generates tension between the shape and the sides of the support. In both cases, be it the emptying of the center or the absence of shapes in the margins, the unprimed fabric acts as another element of the composition. However, in the paintings, the relationship between the shapes is not always about tension or contrast, but different behavioral patterns emerge between them: sometimes some rest on others, while others seem to play and caress each other. In Sendas selvas, the artist transfers these compositional strategies from the paint to the exhibition space. Even though every work has its autonomy, both the relationship of the paintings with each other and with the space enable new interpretations.
Another body of work that in the exhibition dialogues with the paintings is a series of works carried out in paintwork on metal. It is a series of works that from the inside of the paintings shines through their frame, taking the paintwork beyond itself. In most cases, this type of self-supporting works unfolds like a cutting plane in space following similar shapes to paintings. The three-dimensionality of these works also allows the introduction of the time factor of discovery during the tour. In relation to the negative space, the sculptural works maintain an active relationship with the surrounding space, similar to the one the paintings have with the unprimed fabric. Differently, both the paintings and the self-supporting works maintain a constant tension with the relationship of depth, so it is impossible to identify if one color is closer or further away from us. This way, the artist puts on hold one essential convention of perception, distance, meaning the separation between the bodies and the world, between the subject and the object. Elvira Amor’s painting proposes an experience not so much of separation but of continuity and about which could be said what Richard Shiff wrote about Brice Marden: ‘her painting is like a liquid body of water in which any isolated element may be found both in the surface and in the depths’. Something similar occurs in the jungle: when one enters its thickness, all the possible distances disappear.
Javier Sánchez Martínez
Palma de Mallorca, September, 2021