Susana Solano, Proyectos - Brossura

Solano, Susana

Brossura

ISBN 10: 8425221803 ISBN 13: 9788425221804

Casa editrice: Editorial Gustavo Gili, S.L., 2007

Riassunto

Intended to intervene in space, Susana Solana’s work invites us to give in to the emotion of seeing our environment transformed. It re-travels the byways of that contemporary experience of tearing down the barriers of convention and exploring new relationships and new meanings. Her works, both those meant for large inhabited spaces and inscribed within the habitual dimension of architecture, and those that due to their size affect their spatial setting, upset the conventional principles of the division of functions and of uses. And not only because they are in the habit of invading, of occupying, a space hitherto reserved for the silent void that architecture engenders, but because in doing so they transform the usual ways of ordering space itself and the outcome of the experience of inhabiting it.

Susana Solano Rodríguez (Barcelona, 1946) lives in Sant Just Desvern and has her studio in Gelida. Between 1974 and 1980 she studied at the Facultad de Bellas Artes in Barcelona, where she gave classes between 1981 and 1987.

She has participated in international events like Documenta VIII and IX in Kassel (1987 and 1992), the 19th São Paulo Biennial (1987), Skulptur Projekte in Münster (1987), the Venice Biennale (1988 and 1993) and the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (1988). Her work has merited awards like the Special Prize of the Utsukushi-Ga-Hara Open Air Museum, in Tokyo (1985), the Spanish Ministry of Culture ’s Premio Nacional de las Artes Plásticas (1988) and the Premio CEOE a las Artes (1996).

Her individual exhibitions include:

· Fundación Miró. Barcelona (1980)
· Galerie des Arènes, Chapelle des Jésuites. Nîmes (1987)
· Bonnefantenmuseum. Maastricht (1988)
· Bienal de Venecia. Venecia · Venice (1988)
· Städisches Museum Abteiberg. Mönchengladbach (1989)
· Donald Young Gallery. Chicago (1989)
· Hirshhorn Museum. Washington (1989)
· Galería Giorgio Persano. Turín · Turin (1990, 1994, 2000, 2006)
· San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. San Francisco (1991)
· Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Madrid (1992)
· Whitechapel Art Gallery. Londres · London (1993)
· Malmö Konsthall. Malmö (1993)
· Magasin. Centre National d’Art Contemporain. Grenoble (1993)
· Galeria Maior. Pollença (1995, 1998, 2002)
· NBK Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Berlín · Berlin (1996)
· Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig. Viena · Vienna (1996)
· Galería McKee. Nueva York · New York (1996, 1999 y 2006)
· Galería Senda. Barcelona (1994, 1998, 2003)
· Fundação Serralves. Oporto (1998)
· Galería Quadrado Azul. Oporto (1999, 2001)
· MACBA, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona. Barcelona (1999)
· Galería SCQ. Santiago de Compostela (2000, 2007), Vigo (2003)
· Palacio de Dar-al-Horra, Condes de Gabia. Granada (2001)
· Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna. Sintra (2001)
· Abadía de Santo Domingo de Silos. Burgos (2003)
· Galería Helga de Alvear. Madrid (2005)

Su questo libro

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Text from the introduction: ‘Shared space: sculpture and architecture ‘... because it is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, ‘invisibly ’, inside us.’ (R. M. Rilke, letter to W. Hulewicz, 1925) For some time now the words, the lovely words with which we named the different artistic skills, have been insufficient to express the artistic act. This holds true with the terms ‘architecture’ and ‘sculpture’. We go aimlessly in search of them, but no current discourse is capable of once again forging in the language an alternative that serves to name new relationships and the differences in meaning between them. While words show themselves to be lacking, every day art is breaking down the frontiers that traditionally divided the hieratic kingdom of the fine arts, and that still today abide in the distance that architecture, the visual arts, musical events, literary experience, photography and film perpetuate amongst themselves. Nevertheless, the artistic act, if it survives, can no longer be defined any other way than based on a definitive rupture of boundaries and divisions, an ingenious tide of mutual invasions and a defeat of all forms of hierarchy amongst arts and disciplines. Its goal seems to be to go beyond all distinctions of realms which the ceaseless creation of meaning now is: it is irony and criticism towards the watertight compartments the arts have allotted themselves in the tradition of our culture, an exchange and mutual insemination of strengths and energies. A process of wearing away and recasting that not only corrodes the schema of the arts but also belies the very concept of art: condemning the fact that ‘art’ is often just a word, as well as a reference overly limited to the object. An inward-looking concept of art increasingly leads to a vacuous experience, one that is empty and especially worn down by the effect of the frictions in the market, which deals in the objects of artistic production. A wearing away that is in line with the widespread fatigue with which Western institutions are caving in under the trend of the unstoppable decline of an entire civilisation. The paradox may well be that while the object of art is suffering today from all our doubts, the artistic experience is nevertheless thriving, multiplying its ineffable complexity while acidly charged with dismantling its own principles, its own genealogy, its ancient stock. Considering the difficult balance that a work of art must achieve in order to survive a long and exhausting tradition that seems to have experienced everything, does not mean resigning oneself to the negative auguries that foretell its disappearance and death. On the contrary, often, during difficult passages in the past, art with its own testimony has been capable of opening the furrow of new paths and expanding the horizons of its infinite possible meanings. And it has done this precisely by balancing itself gleefully over the pure abyss of its possible annihilation. Only the artistic experience itself can make this gesture of creation. Borges, referring to literature and the portents of its possible end, described how it could still keep existing, precisely, by embodying virtue itself and falling in love with its own dissolution. Similarly, we should not confer the name of art on any experience that is not capable of transforming and critiquing the ancient tradition that has given it a history. In art, experience outlives the object. The experience that is capable of transforming the environment in which we live, the gesture that deposits on the stage of life a final constructed artefact, seems to be capable of transforming the compartmentalised fields of sculpture and architecture, while undermining the ancestral prestige of a monumental order. This is the gesture launched as a challenge to space, which can still make it eloquent, and which allows us to follow the traces of that experience with the expectant passion of any discovery. Susana Solano’s oeuvre, somehow fated to intervene in space, encourages us to feel the emotion of those forms of transforming our environment. It revisits the paths of the contemporary experience that consist of tearing down the conventional barriers and exploring new meanings in new relationships. Her works, both those that have been destined for large inhabited spaces falling within the usual dimension of architecture, and those that due to the scale of intervention only affect the spatial setting that they occupy, stir up the conventional principles of the division of functions and purposes. Not only because they tend to invade, or occupy, a space that used to be reserved for the empty silence that architecture engenders, but because by doing so, they transform the habits of ordering the space itself, and the outcome of the experience of inhabiting it. The nuances of their meanings dovetail with the multiple open-ended evocations that contemporary art ushered in over a century ago, yet they also entail forms of transforming the usual fields of action of our experience in space. Objects, artefacts, that Susana Solano laboriously fabricates, and that have been hung in the places that we inhabit or pass through, or that move through them in random displacements obeying a new-fangled type of occupation of successive scenarios that randomness or destiny is leading them to. Artefacts that, every time they occupy a place, either temporarily or permanently, indicate to us other forms of remembrance, of filing them away in our memory. Artefacts whose meaning is always enigmatic, that transform our way of perceiving the realities of our everyday, enveloping world: the theatres of our life. When viewing the art that Susana Solano has deployed in the stages of space, either inside the architectural matrixes of museums or in the common spaces of urban life, the interpretation of mean-ings is suspended in a realm of ambiguity. Yet at the same time the totality of the whole that they form with the world surrounding them or with the architecture enveloping them takes on new interpretations and displacements of meaning. Sculpture that is no longer sculpture and architecture that merges into a space shared with the most vivid artistic experience that Susana Solano has given it. One could delve into the nature of this transformation. It might be that the inclusion of the presence of the artistic artefact, if it could be called that, in the space highlights what architecture has lost in the frantic, pragmatic and productive system of contemporary life. The artefact, which now only bears a remote relationship to the idea of an urban or monumental sculpt-ure, points with greater clarity in the direction of attributes that architecture has lost, in the age of technical showmanship, of aseptic construction, of the distance currently separating the worlds of matter, construction and common life. Solano’s works act as a link, as a union, that still upholds the environment of the world of our perception and our most emotional, proximate experience. Thus, they also allow architecture to engage in a dialogue with us, bringing it closer to the sensory world. Susana Solano’s works, immersed in atmospheres of architecture, show themselves capable of objectifying the static visual domain of architecture itself over the space we share, capable of breaking the empire of its harsh categorisation into subtle shards of experience and meaning. In multiple evocations of materials, touch, gestures, memories and illusions, they bring us closer. This capacity has to do with the strange strength of the meanings inherent in art, which are more remote, enigmatic and ambiguous than what architecture can allow itself to evoke. Forms of meaning that complement the presence of architecture in a space that is often inhospitable or spoiled. Do they human-ise it? Or perhaps they simply require it to share its harsh limits and confines with the more open, more accessible suggestion of the elaborated, wrought, pounded matter of the sculptural sculptures it houses? Given that these structures with a vaguely sculptural feel are kept close to the presence of the hand and the percussion of the hammer, of the tool and the efforts of a body. In the space we inhabit, they hint at the flexibility of the open-ended meanings of art compared to the crude functionality of the atmospheres enclosed by architecture. They allow for a moment of pure requiescence, of pure disinterested aesthetic contemplation, as opposed to an architecture that is possibly more conditioned by the mechanical imperatives of uses, some servile and subordinate, others simply faithful to their missions. An architecture that is always conditioned by the circuits of the economy and institutional powers-that-be, which only serves to underscore the greater freedom of artistic experimentation installed next to them. Unusual artefacts and objects that still carry with them the reminiscences of a space of creation, of a workshop that is both the matrix and the quarry of the effort and concentration they contain: of the generosity of having imagined and laboriously built them, with passion and inventiveness. Objects that, displaced by at times labyrinthine shifts and itineraries, or designed for specific spaces, always keep the breath of a time when they were an idea, fabrication or construction. Thus, viewed in this way, compared to architecture, Susana Solano’s artefacts/works celebrate the freedom of the artistic meaning that architecture, or the constructed space, can often not re-create, most likely because it is not the proper setting for it. The thorny position of the architectural response, in which any excess of aesthetic meaning falls into banality and rhetoric, can thus be relieved by the presence of the artefact/sculpture, laden as it is with innocence and beauty. Nor do Solano’s works represent a simple order of sculpture. On the contrary, they shed many of the traditional attributes of sculpt-ure as they enter into play with those spaces that everyday needs have required to be functional, or that use has spoiled and distanced from the spectacular theatres of the monumental city. Somehow, they deny the ancient premises of sculpture, just as the constructed setting denies the ancient premises of monumental architecture. An object’s having these characteristics in space distances it from the ancient tradition that linked both spheres, sculpture and the constructed framework, dismantling the traditional purpose of the interpretation of their respective identities. At the opposite extreme to what the monument has meant in the space of a city, or in any shared and inhabited space, the presence of her works erases the signs of imposed meanings, hinders a literal interpretation of memory, supplies this eruption of senses and possible nuances that characterises the contemporary experience of art. New forms for expressing and enriching the experience of inhabiting that no longer require this assignment of roles in which sculpture, either figurative or not, marked spatial symmetries and orders, concentrated explicit meanings in the points of its occupation, and dictated the rule-bound vision of the surrounding spaces. These works suggest other forms of order; they disperse vague meanings in the amplitude of space and in the multiplicity of the interpretations to which our peripatetic experience has a right. Similarly, the long road that Susana Solano has travelled as an artist, also within the vast map of her different actions on reality, has always pointed to this explosion of possible meanings, never literal, within the realm of an architectural universe, or a natural setting, in general, of an inhabited and inhabitable world. For this inhabited space is also the space belonging to nature itself, in which the presence of a constructed object determines this same humanised, amiable action that we call inhabiting. The desire to intervene, using one of the terms that the strange experience of art has acquired in our language. And the desire to converse with the setting. Susana Solano’s entire oeuvre, much broader in its categories, links up with this field of spatial action and intervention, it envelops it and often gives it origin, complements its meanings. Or, from the effect of the evocations of their fabrication, her works indicate the space of return, of a return to the workshop and to the artist’s private world. Other experiments by the author, the most intimate or minimal, in action and photography, exchange meaning with the larger-scale works fated for spatial intervention. Her entire oeuvre somehow intertwines, forming the root system of what is expressed in the spatial interventions. For this reason, tracing the complete itinerary of Susana Solano’s career in the realm of spatial intervention is somewhat akin to drafting the comprehensive structure of this entire map of actions that are interwoven, forming a basso continuo on which the complex cosmos of her oeuvre is established. Tracing the itinerary of the artist’s constant sequence of spatial interventions also allows for an added reflection on the universe of architecture, in all the complex breadth of the term, ranging from the usual settings of what we regard as collective space to the most ambiguous situations of a space that defines the experience of inhabiting, as a distinctive feature of human behaviour. Reflecting on art and architecture, on meaning and collective memory through their intersecting presences, is something that her work makes possible for us. For this reason, the domain of the installations that Susana Solano has created until now is presented in space: as a thoroughfare of continuities that obviously contain loops, comings and goings, reminiscences and portents, but that nonetheless can be travelled step by step, traversing the different events and sequences that the works generate, contemplating what the original design was and what was ultimately installed in reality, what changed places and what was unexpectedly transformed. With all the eventualities en route, with everything that makes the route an epic, a long furrow in time. With one horizon to point to, with a permanent logic of technical experiments that illuminate each other, that modify and mutate from matter and from provenance. A route that contains a correlate in naming, which conceals and reveals episodes of experience and living that draw close to the works while barely touching them. Perhaps all works of art are indissolubly linked to a biography, perhaps the chain that delineates the figure of specific life of its author. But mainly, they are biography itself. Tale and chronicle of another life, the life inherent in objects, suspended in time, which explains the flow of a global oeuvre and of the imagination of its author, even though we observe it separated into thousands of experiments. Copyright of the text: the authors Copyright of the edition: Editorial Gustavo Gili SL

|

Texto de la introducción: ‘El espacio compartido: escultura y arquitectura ‘...porque nuestra tarea es imprimir en nosotro...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Editorial Gustavo Gili, S.L.
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• ISBN 10: 8425221803
• ISBN 13: 9788425221804
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 184