THE GREY SUIT, 2007

ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, PIGMENTED INK, PAPERS, VARIABLE MEASURESMENTS

 

Suppose for just a moment that you can no longer see what you usually see when you look, that you cannot touch what you usually touch when you feel.  That the objects you thought you knew dissolve and words melt amongst themselves, that everything that seemed to have a shape loses it.

 

BERGSON, Henry: Matter and Memory, 1896.

 

Learning can be defined by the relatively permanent changes due to past experiences and the memory is a crucial part of the learning process: without memory the vital and intellectual practice would be lost and the individual could not benefit from past events.  Therefore, learning and memory take part in the same process in which, if one link is broken the whole chain is broken.

We live experiences and learn from them and part of what we learn is stored in complex departments which are kept in our memory waiting for the information to be extracted when required for a future experience, which allows us use this knowledge in benefit of our own subjectivity. We seek information via sensorial appreciation and stimuli through which the lived and non lived experiences make up our own personal and intellectual scale. In a greater sense, learning is the acquisition of knowledge and the memory is the storage of an internal representation of such knowledge. 

 

At 21 I had a massive stroke that changed everything. I suffered a total paralysis of the right part of the body, loss of memory and basic knowledge. I had to re-learn to speak, walk, read or write, among other things, and the journey of recovery was an exercise in overcoming the "be being".

 

This is precisely what led me to this exhibition entitled The Grey Suit.  

 

Borges wrote that we are our memory, an unrealistic museum of inconstant forms full of broken mirrors with which to multiply the artistic representation, in this case, artistic representation.

 

This exhibition,  is the artistic transfiguration of subjective fears and achievements, which is a reflection of the struggle to recover what has been learnt. The absence of memory -amnesia-, the alienation after oblivion –the loss of knowledge- , some of them basic, produce a weakness in the track of identity and they obstruct vital and intellectual development without any limitations.  The outcome of it all, and the acquisition of new knowledge, the continuous construction of our identity in terms of definitive perception, the recognition of who one is and who one might be through artistic representation as a means of expression and personal evolution within a reality, and some circumstances have caused a close look which conceives the complex and delicate framework called memory, storage of thousands of boxes that form us to become what we are.

 

To conclude, I think that the capacity of the artistic expression exceeds art itself and it is personified through the liberation of forms, representations, symbols and incisions.   As George Steiner states “Art is more than Art", it is the overcoming of a state of mind.