Laura González Cabrera_Shelter_04/06/18_05/31/18_Dossier

Word, scene and action

The word and its staging in space is one of the main axes of development of the work of Laura González Cabrera. The gesture becomes the minimum unit of information and its repetition intervenes the surfaces that delimit the scene (fabrics, papers, glass or walls). It is a computed gesture, ordered in sequences to invite the reader/spectator to scrutinize the surfaces in search of meaning.

Making the word visible or invisible is, for the artist, an exercise that studies the conditions that make possible its appearance and disappearance: the spaces, the pauses, the intervals, the distances from one place to another, the journeys.

Stopping here to look at an immobile surface requires the same attention as following a melody, even knowing that this path will bring us closer to a place as uncertain as certain are the rules for this uncertainty to occur.

It is this lack of certainty that feeds the work of Laura González Cabrera, the unknown, the variable, that which after being known is forgotten again. The activity of writing would be an exercise of memory, of recognition through a landscape of data ordered in stories, from which it sometimes extracts a fragment to represent the scene.

The whole body writes remembering the experience.

The meeting

“… Curiosity led me to look into its abyss, which was mine, with the confidence of the one who knows the way back home. Would it be a return, a flight or a refuge?”

In the present exhibition, the words have been taken from an autobiographical story where the artist narrates a singular encounter. Two things happen at the same time: the projection of a yearning and the emergence of a doubt. That is, an affective movement that awakens the will to know and the question that guides the search for this knowledge.

Refuge

To know, in this case, it would not be to exercise the intellectual faculties to approach something, but rather to maintain a state of consciousness, an alertness, or a certain waking state that allows to be present in what happens. This would be the exercise that, carried out in a prolonged way, would bring us closer to the experience of knowledge. Prioritizing the lived and the felt against the argued with ideas from other people’s experiences, since the alien implies distance and the propitious state to know something is that of the proximity.

Les contraintes (the restrictions) and the riddle

The works exhibited here reveal the uncertainty that guides the search, manifesting it as a riddle. In them, a double veil, word and painting, form a diagram based on geometric and numerical transformation rules applied to the words “refuge”, “return” and “flight”, in two languages: Spanish and French. These rules have been elaborated taking into account the prefix re- and the shared lexeme of the words. The resulting diagram is reiterated and becomes a symbol of the encounter from which the story that gives rise to the project starts.

The exhibition is completed with an in situ intervention on the walls of the gallery, the presentation of an event that transforms the space into scene and where the word is returned to action, a flight backwards in search of the origin of the route, the experience that precedes the story.

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