Hache Galería, 2014

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Frontier details

The story is told by Augusto Monterroso towards the middle of the 20th century. While ordering some papers at La Merced Church in Guatemala, an old organist found the last two movements of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. The euphoria of the protagonist, nevertheless, dissipates in the story in a single sentence: nobody wants that end even if it is authentic, all prefer the grace of the inconclusive.

The literary analogy is not innocent, the reading that I propose of the work of Gilda Picabea understands her paintings as a reflection that, at the time when she is interested in the limit of the work, she assumes it as inconclusive. This statement on the border with the oxymoron-needs a prior clarification: I will not try to talk about the ungraspable or the unrepresentable, but to pose a look at specific pictorial aspects that, in turn, provide the viewer with tools to see her work. A few years ago Picabea wondered what we would discover if we approached painting as much as possible. Would it continue inside itself? until where? What would be your limit? The answer is presented in her exhibition Unfinished by proposing a look of proximity on past paintings of her previous work where the lines could hardly be contained in the limit imposed by the frame. Approaching the detail, however, also transforms our way of seeing.

On this occasion, transparent layers of color have become the protagonist of her works. In the particularity of transparency, covering does not mean hiding but a way of building the depth of the picture. Not by chance the disposition of the space and our route take us towards the monochrome Verme, the first painting that meets our gaze and the last one our feet approach. There, one reaches the most extreme detail -that where no line is distinguished- and the deepest surface, in covering / discovering the cobalt and overseas blues. Nothing remains of those monochromes that the history of abstraction posed as the ultimate degree of painting, Verme is only the step where the artist has stopped her step.

Again we are describing a movement of contrary vectors: intensifying the look implies at the same time amplifying it. That is why her use of colors – increasingly prevailing on the plane – is complemented by the study of her history and her qualities: to know from the fluorescent transparency that comes out of the white zinc, to how Apelles, in the court of Alexander, I would have got a black elephantinum by heating up ivory. In that same display, the paintings carry for the first time titles with references that are derived from the texts of Orozco or Saer or the Godard cinema.

But the paintings are objects with borders and Picabea has also taken interest there. The rounded profiles have been replaced by straight eyelashes: “it visually benefits -the artist comments- the idea of the cut, makes present the limit of the frame, the difference between the space of the painting and the other.” An edge that was not born as a form to distinguish, but to allow a better link between two frames that made a single piece. Similarly, that profile makes a subtler relationship in her current paintings, which are neither fatally alone nor completely accompanied. It is not a question of breaking the borders – not a drop of oil falls on the outside of the frame – but of observing them, stopping looking at them. But from the interest on the external limit of the object to the intense look that aspires to the inner end of the painting, the artist’s search is finally unfinished. Like those who rejected the last movements of Schubert, we also prefer the beauty of the inconclusive.

Agustín Diez Fischer, Buenos Aires, Mayo 2014