CARMEN HURTADO: A WHITE CUBE OF ONE’S OWN
Joana Baygual
Oneiric: Of the dream or related to the images and events that are imagined while sleeping.
The pandemic has meant for many artists a creative lapse of reflection and contemplation. Time stopped or passed very slowly. Some of us had all the time to ourselves, and those first two months meant for many people a moment where uncertainty, anxiety and loneliness were very present, but a lot of creation also emerged from those moments of insecurity.
Most of the works that we can see by Carmen Hurtado in the Barcelona Art Enllà gallery belong to that period. The exhibition is titled “A White cube of one’s own”. With this title, Carmen has wanted to play with the white cube, the gallery as her own space to express herself and with “A room of one’s own”, the title of Virginia Wolf’s essay, which refers to the vital need of all women, creators, to have a room of your own, physical or mental, to be able to create and develop as a free woman.
Carmen Hurtado is from Extremadura but has lived in Barcelona for many years. Her works are normally two-dimensional, paintings, where she combines painting with the collage of photographs from magazines that she appropriates, different added materials, drawing, writing, sewing…
Her references are very varied and complex: mythology, literature, art history, her origins, her childhood, her family, femininity and the fact of being a woman.
This exhibition consists of three series: eight large-format oil paintings or the dream series, the series on freedom and a set of small collage works on a wide variety of themes.
The main body is his oil paintings that he combines and completes with collage and micro poetry (small fragmented poems).
These works were carried out during the pandemic and Carmen has modified some later.
They start from dreams. Carmen has always been interested in dreams and poetry. She had previously performed her Dream Journals (Quicklime), where he embodied through poetry the dreams that served as a universe to create. The diaries are three months of poeticized dream diaries that were published by Luces de Galibo publishing house in 2021.
In this new project, the next day he recalls them and from them he makes the poems. He simplifies these poems until he reaches micro-poems, which are what remains of those dreams. From here she looks for images in magazines, documents, that can serve as a reference and places them on the canvas, playing with chance and intuition, building the work by layers and different readings. Then he uses paint, oil or watercolor, diluted or thick, depending on what he wants to express. As Carmen says, dreams dissolve and disappear from our thoughts very quickly, where plans and images are intermingled and are not evident. At the end she adds the fragmented micro poems all over the canvas. These fragments can be read in multiple ways and in different orders. The artist lets the viewer get closer to the canvas, discover the words and make them their own as she most inspires them. They are written in pencil, so it is necessary to approach the work to discover and read them. Sometimes she adds embroideries and seams, which are born from her feminine condition and her taste for sewing, to highlight, as if they were drawings, something that she wants to point out. In many of these works she repeats the emptiness of the white of the canvas, the opposition between the city and nature, bare trees, severe roots, fragmented women, two different planes.
We can highlight several works. In Fleets he refers to the death of Virginia Wolf and Millais’s dead Ophelia, but in the case of Carmen he saves them and makes them float.
In las marisqueiras we see at the top a large and sinister building. Could it be a prison, a psychiatric hospital, niches in a cemetery? Does a wing come out of these structures? Below some women crouching down shellfish, reminiscent of Millet’s The Gleaners, and surprisingly a stack of books. Could it be that thanks to culture and education we free ourselves and do not fall into madness, feeding the spirit? The interpretations are very varied and depend on the analysis of the spectator who approaches the work with his backpack of experiences and baggage. It would be very interesting to know the reading of these works by a psychoanalyst.
Then we move on to a series of works on Freedom carried out this past year.
From a few sentences he develops and raises the works. He encloses it within walls that delimit the space like the plan of a house or a city, with references to the labyrinth. A sewn red thread that refers us to Ariadne and the search for freedom. Freedom is thinking about limits and how to destroy them.
A series of keywords that refer to the work and define the work at the bottom. These works are not dreams. They come from some work carried out about five years ago that he has recovered and reconsidered. It is clear that a work is not finished until an artist decides so. This work combines collage with drawing, embroidery, words, and a certain two-dimensionality through the spatial modification of some detail of the photos. In these works he works more with chance and the intuition of collage.
The third series is a selection of small works also in collage with very diverse themes and references. Nor do they refer to dreams. We catch a glimpse of many fragmented, caged women, references to the white cube room, a place where artists can be more free to express themselves.
Jo Spencer, with her phrase “Write or be written off”, inspires Carmen Hurtado by transforming the phrase into “Create so as not to be erased”, which leads us to the fact that the dissemination of works by women artists is very necessary, still very underestimated , to achieve gender equality in the art world.
Carmen Hurtado, A White cube of one’s own, Art Enllà, Barcelona. Until March 31, 2023.
www.artenlla.com