2018

"Querer parecer noche", group show curated by Beatriz Alonso & Carlos Fernández-Pello, CA2M, Móstoles (SP)

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"I dyed

I make something colored with cochineal

I apply the cochineal

I paint things with colors

I apply the color

I harmonize the colors

I thick the colors

I do something red-chile

I become red-chile

I extract the color "

 

Florentine Codex (1540-1585)

 

 

 

The five curtains are presented as five verses of a poem written by an Aztec dyer included in the Florentine Codex (1540-1585). This poem, extracted from the book by Ana Roquero, "Tincture Plants and their Use in the Royal Botanical Garden" (Madrid, 1982), collects the popular knowledge of the Americas in the dyeing of textiles. What we know today as a chemical process that consists of incorporating a coloring -or decolouring- substance to the molecule of a vegetable or animal matter, at another time it offered a magical, poetic and primary vision of color. The Aztec dyer in describing his task dilutes the limits until man and color become one and the same. 

 



Each curtain makes up a step in the elevator journey to approach - or move away from - a series of images. Images that unfold their condition of images, because they are reversible, enveloping, tangible.

 

The curtains combine opposite processes of addition and subtraction of color to the textiles, as if in the last term, to adhere, to remove, to approach, to move away could remember the relativity of everything in space and time.

 

The eye approaches until it focuses on a fruit. The skin is pierced. The composition of its juice is contemplated as through a microscope.



 

Federico García Lorca once said that in poetry "... there´s no difference between an apple and the sea", because "the apple in its world is as infinite as the sea in its own".

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Belén Rodríguez