Principality of Asturias.
GALLOPING DIRECTION
Marta Mantecón
I’m here
let’s put a forest more or less leafy with a green oval table that, from the right perspective, recalls a mystical mandorla. To access it, it is necessary to go through one of the two lowered arches that pierce the stone wall with ivy located at the entrance: one has a beautifully wrought white iron door and the other leads to the path, marked out by a row of trees that they border a farm with horses. At the end of the walk, to one side, there is a kind of gazebo or cabin open and, on the other, the greenhouse garden, the house and, in the middle, the studio. This welcoming and charming environment constitutes a substantial part of Breza’s artistic and vital imaginary, who paints the places that she inhabits and that, at the same time, inhabit her.
The sense has to do with the faculty to perceive external or internal stimuli. Gallop, etymologically, comes from a compound voice that means run well.
«Painting knows more about me than I do»
Breza Cecchini maintains a deep connection with nature and its cycles that she combines with an inward look, bringing together dreams, nightmares, memories, experiences and affective realities. These images cannot be explained in purely objective or rational terms; They appear more like flashes or visions that are projected from the most hidden of being, lending themselves to meaning and dialectical play, given that the artistic exercise always pursues not knowing. «I know that I have seen, because I do not understand», maintains Clarice Lispector (The passion according to G. H.).
The painting then flows like a channel at the service of intuition and the guts to express what is impossible to say otherwise or, perhaps, to verify the unintelligible of existence. It is about transcribing the invisible in the form of symbols and impressions with which to plumb the depths of the soul.
The images happen. They are like revelations or like “push buttons” —that’s how Susana Blas defines them in her Letters (antes secreto) with Breza Cecchini—capable of awakening hidden emotions».
Art as a way of being in the world. Painting as a means to question oneself about life, confront one’s own contradictions and reach another state of consciousness.
«I want to paint and dream»
The works make room for themselves in the studio, where all possible formats coexist. They call each other, pacing and conversing with each other, regardless of the techniques used. They form a single landscape with the brushes, tubes of paint, jars, containers, papers, notebooks and wonderful objects that lie in space. There is also a mirror that registers our presence as part of such a singular microcosm. Breza defies the logic that governs the white cube (paradoxically, its study from the outside suggests this same form). His creations, always enigmatic, breathe magic and rebellion.
He composes the notes of an intimate diary that collects everything that surrounds him, from the most everyday and familiar to the most dreamlike and surreal. We observe myths and archetypes, beings from stories or fables that revive the imaginaries of childhood. Similarly, we discover strands of poetry, oral or written narratives, and echoes from other chapters of art history. Each stroke is like a heartbeat that you see, so no illustration is possible. Honest and simple, his painting is full of nuances and subtleties that are perceived by looking, without artifice or detours.
The iconography is repeated as in an essay attempt (repeat in French it means to rehearse) with a certain ritual dimension, since it is about releasing the symbols that the images hide. Also of “following beauty to her lair” —as Chantal Maillard points out based on a statement by Arundhati Roy—, although sometimes horror is glimpsed. His is “a painting that howls, that makes what is buried emerge and confronts the abyss”, Natalia Alonso Arduengo opportunely specified (The cards are cast by themselvescat. exp. My four-legged shadow, Robayera Room, Miengo, Cantabria). However, among the shadows, signs can be seen that shine and question us.
«I paint where I am and what I am, but
what I do ends up having an impact on me»
Breza imagines Amazons riding like acrobats or about to gallop and even take flight. Women with arms outstretched and legs ajar who refuse to maintain the closed pose prescribed for their gender. They no longer wait. Her attitude, flexible and expansive, represents the openness to being, the domination of the body and the evidence of knowing herself in her territory. The myth of Nike resonates in them, at the origin of our culture. They may even be allegories of victory.
They are almost always accompanied by other species, especially horses and wolves, which are presented as symbolic incarnations of a kind of double, a signifier or a signified that has yet to be revealed. Beyond the archetypal roles assigned by the traditional narrative, these animals, endowed with a mysterious ambivalence, act as catalysts. Horses, strongly linked to their family culture, represent the home, the known environment and perhaps also the freest, non-domesticated part of our being; the horse is the form that speaks. The wolves, for their part, point to the kingdom of shadows, personifying the fragile side, fears and fears, as well as certain obstacles; however, far from being a threat, they often become caring and protecting allies.
All these beings inhabit a humid landscape, with green skin and overcast skies of blue and gray tones, sometimes bathed in a dense fog that, like a veil, accentuates their spiritual dimension. The brushstroke, vibrant and immediate, transcribes through color the infinite nuances of his imagination. The deeply expressive gesture plays with the different densities of matter, going from figuration to abstraction, from the solid to the liquid and from the fluid to the atmospheric, while the light reveals intensities. From time to time the drawing becomes independent of the color. On other occasions, he introduces glares of gold leaf or silver leaf as a reference to the stars or other states of the soul. Any of the plastic media that he handles, whether they are paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures or textile pieces, help him to structure a beautiful metaphysics —something like the implementation of a poetic thought comparable to the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard or the verses of Juan de la Cruz—with which to restore the power of the imagination in a permanent we are here.
“Life lives me”
Breza exudes intelligence. He is aware that the image perversely stops things that perhaps should not be there —signals or indications that are gaining and losing shape—, so he lets them go. Each composition is, in short, a living space that contains the layers of history that began to be and that is finally offered as an invitation to meaning that appeals to our sensibility, our memory, and our imaginative being in a delicious exercise in interpretation. Breza knows, like Clarice Lispector, that freedom is a secret: «Life is me, and I don’t understand what I say. And then I adore… ».
Note: Quotes in bold are from Breza Cecchini.
Photographs: Marcos Morilla.