Selected Press

Planes, Horizons, Openings, Buenos Aires, 2005.

Works on paper - By Adriana Lauria

The forceful materiality that usually confronts us in Laura Murlender's paintings has, in a certain way, become lighter in this series of acrylics and collages on paper. The technical conditions of medium and support partly determine this, but there are also certain formal elements, developed particularly in this occasion, that propose exits (or entries) to the solid opposition -though not exempt of interstices- of its stratified "walls of paint".

In this group there are works such as Blue, Gray Space II and order in Chaos, where the superposition of layers of white, grays, earths or cobalts, leads to the suggestive sensation of an ancient parietal palimpsest, structured by the grid that regulates strongly expressive textures. In them, we can still appreciate clearly the characteristics that have distinguished the abstractions of Murlender since the beginning of her pictorial activity when, participating in the artistic debate between conceptual tendencies and the return to pictorial paradigms of the late 70' s, she decides to search for a reconciliation that will include tactile qualities, chromatic dramatism and an ordaining control in the orthogonal mesh which in constant combat will strive for mutual compensation.

The material thickness sometimes lightens "per se" and in others, this is achieved through the presence of figures that tend to determine spaces. In this direction, the superposition of figures -always with in the rectangular repertoire- functions as a first suggestive step in paintings such as Red layers, the series titled Standing and collages such as Planes and Industria Argentina. These spaces are also determined by horizon lines in Monolith and Red, Africans and Monolith, compositions in which a sort of tall hermetic buildings are dominant; whereas in the two Deep Blue and in Door towards Gray, she combines these horizons with vanishing lines that accentuate the sensation of depth, dilating distances and opening doors that lead to abysmal obscurity and to mistery.

These allusions to deepness are also present in the atmospheric treatment of certain planes of color, where the transparent superposition and the blurred contours contribute to lighten the compositions submerging them in an ethereal mist.

The more luminous of the dark openings of Space and Window towards Gray, seem to reveal little of the significance of landscapes that are as metaphysical as they are veiled, and where the only thing that is clear and distinguishable is the solitary figure of the square, also dominant in Sunset, Oxide and Earth, Red and Black, Pure Matter and Genesis. These last titles remit to its symbolic dimension, in as much as it is an essential form, basic and perfect, because of its regularity, for visual constructions and, therefore, instrumental in the language of the arts, in addition to being a synthesis representative of the four elements of creation -water, air, fire and earth- and their vital equilibrium

In Cube, the artist deconstructs the figure of the cube and displays; bidimensionally in its different faces, interrupting at the same time the continuity of the model with planes of white, gray, ochre and rust, which are displaced from the thick black perimeters that, likewise the word "cube" painted in one of the angles of the composition, allude more to the concept, to the mental synthesis, than to the geometrical body itself. The painting also represents a clear homage to Cubism which as a vanguard tendency of the early 20th Century inspires the constructivist tradition promoted in the Rio de la Plata by the Uruguayan painter Joaquin Torres Garcia. Murlender cites and recreates from this tradition the geometrical forms, the perpendicular grid on which all the compositions are based and the subjection of the image to the plane with the licenses of transcendent spatiality of some of the works of this exhibition.

The struggle between the emotional factors - turned metaphor by the accidents of an irregular and expressive matter - and the rational one evoqued by the regularity of the system of horizontals and verticals- still continues to be in these paintings as in the previous ones, the essence of the work of this artist who, perhaps, is initiating in these papers a new departure of her creative spirit towards the exploration of other horizons unveiled.

AORIANA LAURIA~ Curator and critic of art. Professor and researcher of modern and contemporary Argentine History of Art at the University of Buenos Aires. Senior Professor at the Universidad del Museo Social Argentino. Member of the Asociación Argentina de Criticos de Arte and the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).