Selected Press

“La Brecha” Newspaper, Montevideo Uruguay, 2001.

The Reconstruction of Time - by Thiago Rocca

Reticulations have been a very ancient pictorial tool that precedes the legacy of the Renaissance and it is still used up to this day to sketch a mural composition, a mosaic or large paintings. They work as a basis made up of intersecting straight lines forming a mesh where the painter structures the composition. This fragile net of pastel crayons or charcoal serves to locate the schematic configurations that later will be developed with more precision and with pigments: it is a way of maintaining the adequate proportions, of doing justice to the initial sketches. It is used to transfer a motive from one place to another as well as to modify its scale, enlarging or reducing the dimensions of the original image. Because of its preparatory use, in the end they will be covered by paint, one could infer that the reticulations are a drawing before the drawing. At the same time, they constitute a weaving that divides the composition in equal portions, significant units that are not interchangeable among each other. The Argentine painter Laura Murlender works in this series of 15 paintings with grid squares and reticulations, but she does not do it with the purpose of filling them up later with human figures, animals or plants, that is, with recognizable forms of the outer world, but as a support for a study of the spatial profoundness of abstract painting, of the density of color and matter.

The colors are applied on the canvas in thick layers (“White net” and “Black net”, mixed media) with the overlaying of new patinas that conform a forcible material thickness, a broken geography, crossed by grooves, that do not exclude the lights and shadows of the contours nor the elegant transparencies. The intentional dripping of paint is evened by spatula (bearing in mind the creative liberties, a bit in the manner in which masons seek to create certain visual and tactile effects with a trowel on the fresh plaster of a wall).

The global result of contemplating these works varies substantially if the spectator does so from a distance or if he comes close to them, remitting him to a painting of depth, of profoundness. At a close range, the chromatic detail becomes an unexpected and luxurious protagonist, as in the case of the cobalt blues of “Vista general”, which, seen from a distance seem to dissipate and humbly integrate themselves into an expressive whole.

It is also strange that, in addition to these spatial connotations on the plane, some paintings produce the impact of an immersion in time, an “archeological” or “geological” search that is prolonged in successive strata of matter. The suggestion is induced mainly by the overlaying of layers and the well chosen range of the color palette: the intense natural sienas, the brilliant blacks gleaming as hot petroleum or tar, the moonlike whites with flashes of cream and pearl. The ever present reticulations are an invitation to observe these paintings as fortified walls or windows, behind which a remote existence, hardly visible through the markings and slits of the surface, could be perpetuated eternally. A world submerged in the past. An undiscovered time, of expectancies and lethargy.