While at this hour everything is clamoring in the last preparations of the galleries present in
ARCOmadrid 2024, which opens tomorrow, March 6,
a landscape in all shades of black
trembles on the third floor of the CA2M, as they call the
2 de Mayo Art Center, in Móstoles
, the industrious suburb 25 km from Madrid that has been gained the attention of the circuit in recent years.
By the way, its director until last year was Manuel Segade, today projected to be the director of none other than the
Reina Sofía Museum.
This Saturday 'Tembló acá un delirio'
opened this Saturday ,
the great exhibition of the artist
Ana Gallardo
, Rosario who has lived in Mexico since the 80s. It offers a set of great works, in four rooms, that cover decades of work and thematic persistence.
The exhibition, curated by Alfredo Aracil, who lives in Buenos Aires, and the Spanish Violeta Janeiro,
is not presented in the manner of a classic retrospective
;
Strictly speaking, the curators do not even condescend to the titles and details of many of the works.
It will be a journey to rawness.
In fact, the exhibition, which continues until March 19, seems more conceived as
an immersion in the Gallardian “environment”,
of forceful messages, public positions and gloomy perspectives.
Between lament and tribute
Born in 1958, Ana Gallardo has been displaying the different gender problems in her generation of women.
She witnessed
violence against women
in the country of
"the dead women of Juárez"
, long
before the #MeToo movement
and the green wave.
Likewise, she saw the spread of femicides in her country of origin and throughout the region.
But she has also reflected the
micropolitics of patriarchy
within the family, in loving and filial relationships.
And all of this is in the foreground here, in the forms of
elegy and tribute
.
In the same way, few works so expressly record – with a parsimony devoid of decorations – the will that art should set out to change practical reality.
These pieces
do not promise light at the end of the path,
except for the evocation and recreation of an intimate and at the same time hard heart, populated by affections.
With the violence of graffiti made with a dagger.
Photo by Cézaro de Luca
Between the violence of the complaint and the realm of feelings, at its extremes, I say, is the 7-meter wall where
the micro-story of a visit to a nursing home has been recorded like a wound – with the violence of graffiti and the dagger.
of old prostitutes.
And the
Study for a reading
, the hypnotic 25-minute video in tribute to
his mother, Carmen Gómez Raba, secret still life painter
.
All dimensions of grief fit into both.
Seeking to "restore" what was lost
At the very entrance of the exhibition, headphones hang: Gallardo's message with the sections of the resume that every artist will always seek to hide – this is the only drop of humor and surprise without complacency.
Starting in the 70s, she presented herself as an
assistant in a dental center, a broker of personal hygiene items, and
a smuggler of
Argentine leather destined for Mexico, until in 2006 she finally seemed to opt for full professionalism, when she worked on the documentation of private collections. , those of Judge Bruzzone and Alec Oxenford.
And later, she as curator of the art space of the Resto Lelé de Troya.
AG: an
antiheroine of art.
With that load of wasted time – or quite the opposite, he seems to say, nourished by real vicissitudes –, we entered "Study II for the restoration of a profile", the first of the rooms, the initial tribute to his mother: Carmina,
painter secret still life collection
to whom the patriarchy denied visibility and opportunities.
On the left, still life of Camina;
On the left Gallardo reinterprets a still life of his mother.
Wallpaper with the original paintings.
Photo Cézaro de Luca.
The original flowers and still lifes by Carmen Gómez Raba, which are also themed in the wallpaper of these walls, are exhibited and
“restored” by the daughter in new versions,
referenced and amplified with extreme freedom.
Gallardo is denied
permission
for the large size, in monochromatic acrylic paintings, while
Rosario Gallardo
provides beautiful ceramics that materialize Carmen's paintings.
A gobelin by
Gabriela Rayón
adds the textile translation.
The whole thing is immersive.
On the left, a still life by Carmina.
In the center, the Rayón gobelin and to the right, painting by Ana Gallardo.
The background paper obsessively replicates the original motifs.
Photo by Cézaro de Luca
Survival after tragedy
On the left, the second chapter of the exhibition exposes entire panels of texts and wire embroidery on charcoal planes – an
absolute black surface that is “immaculate” as long as it is not rubbed
.
Gallardo's work has been exhibited in the exhibition "A place to live when we are old", at the Museum of Modern Art, 2015;
These particular pieces were seen at the Ruth Benzacar gallery and at her stand at
ARCOmadrid 2023
.
Unstable fragments of a gender tragedy.
Photo Cézaro de Luca
These are fragments written and embroidered on wire, which make up
a story that is both unstable and unfinished
, marked by a poetic voice:
“I am looking for my sister”
, almost an epigraph embroidered with metal thread at the bottom of the plane;
“but they couldn't disappear you because you are in the water.”
In other more compact texts, drawn in print and without accents or graphic marks of hierarchy, we read: “I find a river/ I think you are/ there you turned/ water stream” or “I went to the mountain as a teenager/ I also wanted to defend for the blood/shed of my father/and brother murdered/my sister and little brother kidnapped.”
Are they the same family or
isolated voices from a female choir, miraculously saved?
: The suggestion is that those fragments were all that survived from a handful of lives.
In truth, these are
the epitaphs of a tragedy.
The high price of loving speech
One of the most interesting works in this exhibition – hypnotic and with the joy of secrecy – may be "Study I for the restoration of a profile: reading essay III", the 25-minute video in which the artist reads a recovered bundle of intimate letters from her mother to her father, a few years before the girl Ana, their daughter, was conceived.
The letters – passionate, full of insecurity and at the same time barely suggestive – bring us back to the 1950s in their entirety, the time of female erotic restraint and modesty.
And they reveal, in the light,
the enormous potential for art that was cut short
in the life of Carmen, a married woman with children, who also died young.
Women
in a mirror
is an image with a rich tradition in both the visual arts and literature and Gallardo is the bezel where both reverberate: she is its witness and heir, the righteous memory.
She reads the letters dressed in mourning, with a long black habit and her head against the wall, in
perpetual penance,
while the image tours an old restored colonial house in central Mexico.
That house tells another story of postponement and legacy: it belonged to the Mexican Mónica Baptista, who also studied art in Europe but eventually dedicated herself to
restoring antiques
.
Both failed vocations are superimposed.
Such are tiny lives, aborted vocations.
Gallardo does not need to affirm this time that practical life has been the historical trap for women.
This "Study" was presented four years ago at the MUAC, the museum of the Autonomous University of Mexico, whose collection includes several of his works.
Ana Gallardo has participated in group exhibitions in institutions and museums such as the Maison Rouge, in Paris (2015);
Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013);
the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013) and the Museum of Memory and Tolerance, Mexico City, (2012).
She also participated in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and the 29th São Paulo International Art Biennale (2010).
By special envoy to Madrid
MS/JS