ELEMENTS FOR A LANDSCAPE
A landscape is –among other definitions– a "natural space admirable for its artistic appearance", according to the Real Academia Española. Nonetheless, the more the artist reads the definition, the more doubts she has. She doesn’t consider that a landscape must be admirable. There might also be frightening, distressing, oneiric, or disturbing landscapes. There might be landscapes that make us tremble with emotion, but also others that may cause us nightmares or, what is worse, provoke indifference. The term natural, moreover, generates a certain conflict for her, as when she observers a photograph taken by Lori Nix, she feels like it could be a landscape just like is the view we contemplate from any country house.
Jacarilla believes that, in the end, she identifies the most with that expanded landscape, changeable, metaphoric, and difficult to narrow down of which John Berger spoke about. That landscape that is only created when we look at things in a concrete way. In painting, literature, cinema, and everyday life. That landscape that confronts us with nature –whatever “nature” might mean– to show, once again, our relative insignificance. That landscape that we observe without being able –fortunately– to completely comprehend it. That landscape that we create without being aware of it. That landscape formed not only by what is present, but also by what is absent. That landscape we spend all the time writing about, even without knowing it. That landscape of infinite appearances that we constantly describe in hundreds of thousands of works of fiction.
Although, on the other hand, the artist asks herself: what would happen if people were landscape? Not only by being part of it as another element, but being it, transforming ourselves in it, becoming landscape itself. Human bodies like mountains, rivers, valleys, and plains. Human bodies that change, grow, and evolve, that transform like the protagonists of changing sex of The Left Hand of Darkness, by Úrsula K. Le Guin. Human bodies that, just like those oceans, mountains and valleys, are constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed without pause, being a fundamental part of our artistic imaginary since immemorial times.
Elements for a landscape proposes a subjective journey through some elements that are liable to be part of a possible landscape. Images and texts that feed one another back when combined in different ways, forming an atlas as unfinished as open to multiple interpretations.
20 MAR — 12 JUN
c/Lluís el Piadós, 3
08003, Barcelona
Tuesday to Friday. 11:00–19:00 h
Saturday. 11:00–14:00 h
c/Lluís el Piadós, 3
08003, Barcelona
Tuesday to Friday. 11:00–19:00 h
Saturday. 11:00–14:00 h