2023-09-05 06:00:34
Josefa reproduced what the calls told her beings of light. Madge, for her part, drew what the “eyes cannot see.” They did not meet and it is unlikely, if not impossible, that one knew of the other’s existence. And yet, from different countries and sensibilities, from Cabrils the first and London the second, they forged an unbreakable bond: that of art whispered in the ear from another dimension. The esoteric knowledge and the automatism of the altered state of consciousness as a gateway to the “essence and origin of art.”
«They are part of a genealogy of women’s art that, far from the European aesthetic avant-garde, make up a mystic rearguard that from the domestic space fills the interior exile with an intense psychic experience and a powerful creativity”, we read shortly after entering the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC).
“They are artists of vast production who never thought they would be recognized with this condition, because they did not create their works with an aesthetic or commercial intention,” adds Pilar Bonet, curator of ‘La mano guiada’, an exhibition that brings together the “singular work” at the Barcelona museum and almost unprecedented” Josefa Tolrà (Cabrils, 1880-1959) and Madge Gill (London, 1882-1961).
Two women united in mourning and in the balsamic power of art and two creators who overflowed with their work “academic art” thanks, among other things, to the development of “psychic drawing, automatic writing and a textile work of singular beauty”. . Singular and, depending on how you look at it, also unsettling. There are the faces of Tolrà, with those eyes as if from an abyssal chasm, sharing space with the checkerboard floors and the sidereal inflorescences of Gill. Art, never better said, as a mirror of the soul.
shared duels
Because while Tolrà, born into a family of peasants, began to draw “guided by the spirits” after her eldest son died in a prisoner camp during the Civil War (the youngest had already died in 1924); Gill, sent to work as a day laborer in Canada when she was a child and mistreated during her time in an orphanage, took refuge in drawing after losing sight in one eye and suffering, like Josefa, the death of two of her children. . “They coincide in duels and creative processes, they draw and embroider at night, without models or pauses, they use encrypted alphabets and their messages are pacifist, mystical, feminist and scientific,” the curator points out. Hence, in addition to pens and brushes, their weapons are also astrology, the pendulum, magic, active meditation and aura reading. “Her creativity of hers is connected to the utopian spiritualities of the early 20th century in Europe and integrated into a socially based Christianity,” says Bonet.
Similarities between the work of Tolrà (on the left) and Gill (on the right) ABC
At the exhibition, the motley cosmic drawings de Gil and the spectral silhouettes of Tolrà, whose stories and handwritten novels are also shown, are the projection of some “soul wounds” that have left their mark in museums such as the Prado, the Macba, the Pompidou and even at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Tolrà’s work was presented. Quite a triumph for two women who, without artistic or literary training, never considered themselves artists.
After all, they were not creators, without mediums, and as such they signed their works: Madge as ‘Myrninerest’, the name of the one who guides her hand; and Josefa as ‘Fluidic force drawing’. «They recover the knowledge and creativity of women, connect with the ancestral and protective function of art, renounce the notion of authorship, apply esoteric knowledge and offer the generations of the 21st century inspiration to transform the world from a new wave of feminism,” says Bonet.
Josefa Tolrà (on the left) and Madge Gill (on the right) ABC
His connection with the afterlife, moreover, goes beyond the purely artistic: Madge Gill he entered spiritualist circles in search of solace after a life marked by mistreatment and loss, and Josefa Tolrà he sought in theosophy what he did not find in earthly life. So much so that the Catalan woman perceived the aura of people, she helped them as a healer and, as if that were not enough, she communicated with the dead. Among them, Jacint Verdaguer, Jacques Pasteur and Saint Teresa of Jesus. Thus, it is understood that between 1941 and 1959 she made more than a hundred drawings that are “transcriptions of the dictates of the spirits.”
“Their visionary experience begins in communication with ‘beings of light’, souls, and turns into a life mission that allows them to help those who need it through drawings and predictions,” says the curator. They too, of course, seek comfort there for their multiple earthly misfortunes. «Only when I draw do I feel at peace», which Tolrà came to say. “There is no beginning or end in this human representation of what is invisible,” the curator settles.
#Women #painted #spirits #combat #mourning #grief