Selected Press

Laura Murlender, Buenos Aires, 2001.

The dreams of substance - by Pablo Baler

In each new encounter with Laura Murlender’s inner landscapes one has to transcend the introspective experience of an essential conflict. Because, in the fabric of her paintings, where geometrical tracings coexist with a visceral expressionism, a fascinating game takes place between intellect and emotion, between idea and substance. The fact that works of art participate of these two apparently incommensurable dimensions, is a prodigy that has always occupied aesthetic reflections. Murlender’s paintings, however, are not just mere invitations to reflect on this link but they also appear before us as the battlefield where this interaction between the universal abstractions of the spirit and the tangible nature of our lives and our bodies, unfolds.

In these last years, Murlender’s art has evolved towards a lyrical constructivism in which the dense, sensual and vibrant application of material offers us glimmers of meaningful narrative suggestions. We seem to recognize hidden beings, overwhelming constructions, striking lights, labyrinths, ruins, aerial views... We could not conceive a story, but we share the intuition that, in all cases, these works are about a journey towards the beginnings of a history, towards the first moments of the artistic creation. This is so much so, that Murlender’s very personal palette seems to respond more to a careful chromatic selection, to an inexorable necessity: the ochers, the sienas, rusts, and earth colors go back not only to the ancestral walls but also to the primeval clay. Indeed, Murlender’s colors and shapes remit us, in their poetry of what is eternal and what is terrestrial, to the very instant of the first breath of life.

To be sure, this must be the reason why, every time I venture into the ciphered geometry of these paintings, among the vestiges of scars and past distresses, that intriguing idea from Unamuno comes to my mind: “Love shows how much body has the soul”; because, far from offering us an art that explains itself by the candid confrontation of opposing extremes, Murlender’s work allows us to perceive from the brim of the abyss, that the most intimate yearning of the spirit is to be able to take shape in space and time and that, in turn, all substance aspires to dreams and thoughts.