2024-07-14 10:48:58
HOUSE WITH HORSES
Marta Mantecón
Commentary
The triptych that gives the title to this project comes from the opening sequence of the film Andrey Rublyov by Tarkovsky (1966): “The novel predates the following scene: a blacksmith makes some wings, climbs a cathedral, jumps into the void from a high point and crashes to the ground. He couldn’t see anything. And he fell down and died: no more. As he flew, we saw a herd of horses in heat. At the time of the fatal accident, the horse-animal that provides endless descriptions-turns in the earth, falls and rises, showing how nature, alien to history, follows its own future. Natalia Julve took this position to the big books, changing each one. He painted the clay that he had previously mixed with his hands, since he was using a lead that had graphite fibers bound together in the fat he could make. Often, the artist’s starting point is a personal archive of photographs, perhaps to restore their material status. Summary that opens the project, Pell (Skin), part of the detail of the painting kept in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon: The Bretons are forgiven by Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret. It was painted in 1887, a year after Paul Gauguin arrived in Pont-Aven, in France, looking for the original, a year before Paul Sérusier installed it. The Talismanwhich gave rise to the group Los Nabis. Catalina Julve experimented with tablets of printed pigment, similar to the chalk of the weavers, which allows to sketch and have a better effect in the nature of the drawing, which is no other than “know and perhaps correcting an apparent contradiction: one that occurs between presence and absence»2. Both the Bretons and the the gardener (Garden) who coined this term, refers to contact with nature as an important step on the road to freedom. Skin is skin. The landscape, a construction.
The landscape
Tarkovsky’s film tells the story of an icon painter. Shot entirely in black and white, it ends with a color sequence of his paintings while the horse eats in the rain, presenting a beautiful comparison with the initial gallop. In a fictional extension of this narrative, Catalina Julve’s landscapes represent the progressive release of the referent. The artist is moving towards a minimalistic format, sharing with portraits to immerse himself in nature from his own experience. It is an immersive process that makes you go away from typing information to let the hand speak, without complex formulas, surrendering to intuition, uncertainties, the world and the unaccountable, playing with rhythms and exploring sound all that involves painting beyond the subject: its degree of saturation, its nuances, its brightness or opacity, relationships and differences. A more spontaneous practice connected to the site pursues a purely experimental purpose, which offers the opportunity to investigate other ways of approaching the artistic reality that appeals to the loss of control, daring and, above all, freedom3 . The skin opens in several layers and the control is increasing. The forms take freedom, making impressions of the elements of the landscape (a horse, a bird, a tree or a fountain) come with undetermined processes that are already on a more plane. Each composition presents itself, asking what it needs. Visualization then reveals its pure nature. We are witnessing a world structured in accordance with a changing nature, in perpetual change. The artist uses acrylic and graphite paint sticks from the Viarco company in João da Madeira (Portugal). Again, pigment and fat.
Epilogue
Terraces are pieces of land used for all kinds of crops, so they are a source of food and nutrition. Catalina Julve called this the color points with which she has done the whole project. They are monochrome that show the pure material of colors with their weight, their hydration, their smell, their flavor, their intellectual values and their mineral or organic origin. Arrange in overlapping layers of color, each Wobbly shows its most physical and corporeal dimension-something like process from lean to fat which gave rise to oil-painting technology in the 16th century—until it received the discovery of almost sculpture. Catalina Julve presents such images in an advanced work of simplification and awareness of the intimate connection between nature, art and materials. Everything ends up diluting until it becomes an abstraction, know that in a monochrome, what is inevitably lost is still there. “You notice to see what you don’t see when you don’t notice” 4.
Notes:
1 Andrei Tarkovsky: Sculpt in time.
2 John Berger: By drawing.
3 «To come to what you want / You have to go where you don’t want to. / To come to what you do not know / you have to go where you don’t know»inside John of the Cross: the mountain is perfect.
4 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Notes on colors.
Catalina Julve, Landscape with horseInstitute of Balearic Studies, Artesantander, Palacio de Exposiciones y Congresos, Santander. From July 12 to 16, 2024.
More information:
http://www.iebalearics.org/es/noticas/artes-visuales/artesantander-2024.html
https://www.catalinajulve.cat/
#Landscape #Horse #MArt #Visual #Culture