TERRA BLAVA
Castell de Benedormiens, Castell d’Aro (Costa Brava)
From 19 March to 8 May 2022
Inauguration: Saturday 19 March at 19 hours.
Saturdays, Sundays and holidays of 11-13h and 17 to 20 hours.
At Benedormiens Castle, under the title “Terra blava” (Blue Earth), Lourdes Fisa presents a cross-section of her work, one which covers various stages and themes. As the focus of the exhibition, the artist has taken the two main lines of her work: the earth on the one hand, and water on the other. These are two symbolic and sensory elements that form the backbone of her pictorial sensibility, her constant artistic exploration in which she looks at concepts relating to nature and also to humanity: fragility, strength, pain, light, travel, movement, among others.
The core of the work presented here, as well as throughout the artist’s career, focuses on an abstraction that draws on certain material qualities of informalist painting or abstract expressionism but incorporates elements of her training as an engraver, a discipline in which, to a greater or lesser extent, she has continued working to this day. She uses it both as a principal technique and as an underlying technique that influences her painting. The mixture of techniques is something she applies naturally, using them as an instrument for the exploration of style and form, which are ultimately the main expressive subjects to which she devotes herself. If we take, for example, the influence of informalism as a reference for analysing her work, we will immediately find that there is nothing that is particularly informalist given that her entire aesthetic trajectory shows a tendency to order, to a certain return to the geometry that she imposes in spite of the expressiveness and the gestures she seeks as she attacks the surface. It is as if Fisa started with an intact and essential impulse that then needs to be tidied up, placed within a space. It is precisely this ‘tidying up’ that gives strength to the expression and gesture; otherwise, we would be faced with an exercise in mere inundation with no connection between the creative act and the gaze. The artist is aware, albeit intuitively, that this is necessary in order to bridge the gap between creative energy and the gaze of the viewer. The work, in short, has this dialogue as an objective.
One of the main lines of work that we can observe in this exhibition is the mixed technique – painting, engraving and others – on different media such as fibreglass, an industrial material which, nonetheless, she endows with almost organic qualities. The treatment she gives it, in terms of colour and engraving, painting and rubbing back – or, directly, aggression – turns it into a kind of skin that looks as fragile as human skin. It is also a material that allows her to play with transparencies and translucency, which she has explored in some pieces that include an interior light source and which become luminous sculptures. On the other hand, it is also a kind of surface on which to create compositions with a cartographic resonance, as if they were forever swimming between the earth and the skin, that is, the body. Less corporeal, however, is a large part of her work that is dedicated to lighter colour palettes, between blue and white, greys and other ranges of colour that convey to the viewer a certain feeling of flux, also accompanied with a slightly greater diffusion of form. However, if there is one thing that stands out in almost all of the artist’s work, it is figuration; always subtle, slight, as if hinted at or emerging from the midst of colour and the material, there appears the simple drawing of some element of nature or a human figure, an architectural or anatomical detail. These figurative notes only accentuate the rhythm, the expressive force and the ambiguity of the work; they underline and complement what the colour and density are beginning to suggest and what the structure and composition are responsible for ordering. It is, perhaps, another humanizing factor, a resource for rediscovering the imprint of the intelligible, the poetic, the symbolic.
To be precise, certain more graphical elements also bring Fisa’s artistic work closer to the symbolic and poetic world I’m talking about. Repeatedly, and as a leitmotif that crosses through the structure of much of her work, we find circular or oval elements that articulate or balance the composition. Consistent with the thematic background that relates to nature and the essential, it seems clear that the elements of a circular disposition are part of a universal language that refers to the cyclical meaning of nature and life and to the primordial forms, to the geometric character proper to the terrestrial sphere. Another element that also often appears is the written word, although mostly illegible, which operates as a sign beyond the intrinsically human, insisting on showing up, leaving a mark on the canvas, the fibreglass, the wood, the paper or the paint itself.
But Lourdes Fisa states that, for her, figuration is an ever attractive option that allows her another expressive form, one more direct and often more delicate. She uses this particularly on paper, either in engraving or painting, with a much more two-dimensional approach but which, despite this, gains a different, more narrative and allegorical content. We see this, for example, in the series made for the exhibition “SOS Natura” (SOS Nature), where the figure appears as the protagonist in a sequence of pieces that reflect on the impact on the environment of the use of plastic; or, also, in the series “Dones d’aigua”, (Women of Water), which takes nature as a reference.
Thus, we are confronted with the career of an artist who constantly experiments with various techniques, formats and paradigms in order to express herself. From gestures to drawing, passing through geometry and all the territories that hybridize each of these attitudes and conceptions of the artistic fact, Fisa is an artist committed to the creative act in itself and as a means of communicating an inner world but also a world of universal values and the concerns of contemporary life. These concerns materialize in the ambiguous relationship between the corporeal and warm values of the earth and those of water, more closely related to transparency, fluidity and movement; however, it is never a dichotomy but rather they are complementary elements that are part of the aesthetic world she builds with each piece: we are often neither with our feet on the ground nor are we floating in a crystal clear sea, but we tread on those border territories that stimulate us to feel and to think, to reencounter the way of seeing and those truths with which it connects us.
Download PDF : CULTURA Expo Lourdes Fisa 20222
Platja d’Aro.com : Terra blava – Exposició de pintura
Bonart.cat : “Tierra azul” de Lourdes Fisa en el Castillo de Benedormiens
TVCostabrava : Lourdes Fisa inaugura Terra Blava al Castell de Benedormiens