María Olga Giménez

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““…How nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House!
I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! …
Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze,
so that we can get through! …
It’ll be easy enough to get through!
…In another moment Alice was through the glass,
and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.”

Water is nature’s looking glass, and is unique in its double capacity to mirror: from the light and through the shade. Considering that water makes up three quarters of the world and our bodies contain approximately the same proportion, we understand that each person has a mirror inside themselve that reflects with the same quality. The work of Patricia Claro naturally invokes out capacity to speculate, moving us to go beyond the surface of the mask in a similar way as Alice, using imagination and dreams. This entrance to the dream realm in art, particularly in landscape art, was recognized by Gastón Bachelard in 1942, who sustains that: “Only the landscapes we have seen first in our dreams are the ones we see with an aesthetic passion” .

Her creative process begins with a journey to the water where one always finds the same characteristic: they will be clear waters that mirror and reveal a calm and permanent movement. These waters act as an infinite source of different images submitted in each moment.

The water is the origin of the process, the first lens. The artist’s participation starts by mirroring herself, saving oneself from the gaze of Narcissus to allow that both mirrors are recognized and extend into their immensity. Here it is necessary to capture this moment by means of digital photography; to detain the scene in movement and conserve the sequence of fleeting reflections. The image chosen for the second lens of the process may contain one or more of the elements that will be represented in the pictoric work: the exterior landscape, of which the trees, a branch or the sky may form; and the interior landscape made by the depths of the water. It can also be present in the water itself, with its currents in the form of waves or its apparent stillness.

At the moment of reconstituding the materiality of the water or its body, brings out the importance of the existence of the movement within. This body depends on the possible refraction of light -that reveals the exterior-, or the presence of the shade, resulting from an external object -that reveals the interior. It is the product reflection of the movement of the water that permits the light to cover that which the shade reveals of the depths, acting as a veil. This play of light and shade creates a reversibility of the image that is appreciated at the inversion of the position of the painting: we see the sky that is water and a landscape of water and green that is sky.

Water clipping: and entrance into the time of nature

 

The photography taken on site represents an incision of death in the time of the water that freezes its flow. Lather, the process of cropping in the studio prolongs this action. Then it would be fitting to ask about the relationship that exists between the crop and the mirror.  

“Mirrors: to this day, no expertise can explain
the key to what you truly are;
filling the interstices of time’s plane
with mere holes as from a colander.

Spendthrifts of the vacant foyer —
wide as woods beneath twilight stars. ..
And the chandelier bounds like a sixteen-pointer
through your impenetrability.

Sometimes you are filled with canvases.
Some even seem absorbed into your depths —
other styles you timidly dismiss.

But the loveliest remains, until appears
Narcissus to press her chaste lips,
fully liberated and crystal clear.”

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke brings us closer to the answer: the mirror represents an interval of time, a cut in the linearity of the life it reflects. The water is part of the nature, whose time is circular and we share, in part, this indeterminable cycle of life and death. For this reason, when the artist is reflected in front of it, it creates a point of refraction between them that permits one to transfer the images beyond time. This makes possible that the sequence of clippings contributes to capture the final image of the water represented in the picture.

Claro’s technological eye is key in her “reflective” process. In a true virtual laboratory work, making use of digital programs, the image that will be the underlying layer of the work is translated through media. This third clipping of water understands the deconstruction and decomposition of the image in its basic geometric forms isolating the color, light and shade. It is significant that this work is realized as opposite the original: it is the machine -created by man- that has the capacity to isolate the elements of the natural landscape. bringing it to its state of primitive chaos.

The work in the studio constitutes a true reflective contemplation that captures time brushstroke by brushstroke. The canvas receives the image progressively, beginning with the light and continuing to the depths of to conforming the pictorial materiality. This is the reflective time of the artist, different than that of the water that mirrors in an instant. We see that three times exist in the work of Claro: the time of the water, the frozen instant; the time of the creative process; and the time of the viewer when they face the work that already makes a mirror.

Among those postulating from Land Art, Robert Smithson signals the existence of a relationship “between the earths surface, its features, etc., and the fallacies of though and fictions of the spirit. The sinking earth, the flaws, etc., are not produced solely in nature as in the human mind.” This idea affirms that the systematic process of destruction of the initial image corresponds with the crystallization of its impression on the subconscious of the artist as well as its reconstruction states the return to the consciousness of that image. the metaphor of the mirror represents this principal: the shadow of the water is the shadow of the mind, the subconscious, the unknown with respect to itself, and the light reflected is the identity of self.

We then have an image that begins with the water of nature and continues in the waters of the mind to emerge again as water in the piece, forming a trinity: water – mirror/mind – water.
The abstraction process to the image represents a conceptual reduction, based on bringing the imaged to their universal forms to later begin its appropriation on the canvas. The different cuts create the abstraction: the photographic, the framing in photoshop, and the clippings of the mask. Afterward, the layer of the reflection finishes the process, restoring the unity of the image.

The particular reconstruction of the landscape beginning from a selection of water represents a pictorial synecdoche, central concept in Patricia Claro’s proposal. The poetic subjectivity of the artist is incorporated through the feminine gaze toward a detail that is re-constitude. “Perhaps there does not exist an individuality in depth that makes the matter, in its smallest parts, be always a totality?” .

The result of this process is the work we have in front or us, that provokes the following question: How does our own mirror act in front of these waters?
The originality of the artist is manifested in the change of focus or gaze to the exterior, that goes from horizontal to vertical, similar to the view see by a satellite. This vertical gaze makes a global perception of nature and man possible, situating us in front of a grand horizontal mirror that transfers the surroundings in an infinite process: the water. This unitarian perception of the world is united to its technological look in respect to the handcraftedness and creative process implying the experimentation of traditional techniques and the use of digital medias, giving the work the multicultural connotation that places it in the contemporary world.

For Claro, the water will always be and aesthetic and poetic inspiration and source of inexhaustible composition. The video complementing the exposition is an example of this expressing the reflective capacity of the water when is mirrors itself, to be reflected and dejected at the same time. Also the group of works exhibited horizontally on the floor of the gallery permit the spatial return of the water to its natural place.

The spectator confronts the simultaneity of realism and abstraction: the distant gaze allows a realistic perception of the piece, while closer inspection reveals a collection of textures, marks and relief that makes up the materiality of the work. This experience concludes the reflective process initiated by the author, returning to the original time of the first instant of activating the reflection of another mirror.

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