_A Formal Dream_Laura González Cabrera / Sabine Finkenauer _11/20/20_01/18/21_dossier

This exhibition is presented as a dialogue between the work of the artists L.G.C. and S.F., taking as its leitmotif the underlying order of an interior world that is reflected through “A Formal Dream”.

Many of the pieces shown are the result of work done during the reclusion imposed by the pandemic, which, far from being an impediment, has catalysed a process of introspection and connection to a depository of images and mental content, often set apart from the consciousness. The unconsciousness is not irrational; rather, it has a logic that organises discourse and its formations, of which the dream state is an example.

Through the structures of an intuitive system comparable to the paradigm of a dream, the artists L.G.C. and S.F. create forms that unite the geometric and the organic. As we comb through the formal aspects of their respective oeuvres, we find each particular vision through what seem to be formal features and procedures that obey the paradoxical laws pertaining to the oneiric world that multiplies and fractures them.

Both artists develop their work on the basis of a symbolic system, which like everything related to order, also contains the principle of its own destruction.

S.F. constructs her poetical imagination using primary figures, charging them with a new procedural meaning that explores the tension between form and representation, flat surface and space. Through a formal exercise that has become increasingly generic and abstract, she has developed a process of autonomous creation that could be defined as a strategy of simplicity within rather complex borders. In this exhibition the artist presents a body of recent work where she employs forms and fragments alluding to ornament, thus exploring compositional possibilities, uniting rigour with arbitrariness.

For her part, L.G.C. takes up an existing system, namely writing and its graphemes as represented on reticular surfaces, alluding to the web of a loom. The veiled messages and letters vanish into the weave. The link between weave and text, its internal arrangement, finally causes the disappearance of the ultimate sense of written language, legibility, and thus communication itself. This is an occultation that privileges a certain mystical intuition of that which is related to phenomena, where the given world appears as a heavy curtain, blocking our view to what is true and profound.

In each case, then, the sequence of operations carried out so the forms might integrate and disintegrate the systems that have been created, points to a thinking hand, an organic process that emphasises craft and the geometrical, crystallising in ornamental shapes. It is not in vain that ornamentation has been a symbol of cosmic action, of the unfolding of space, of “emergence from chaos”. Gradual submission to order points to the progressive stages of this universal evolution, where the artists participate through their processes.

with the support