Ángel Mollá
One has to have the courage –like the Greeks- to stand before the surface, the fold, the skin. One has to be able to admire appearance and believe in shapes, sounds, words… Greeks became superficial through being deep…
Nietzsche (1886): Prologue to The Gay Science.
(This English version is an extract of the full text which is 15 pages long)
Folding, unfolding, re-folding
Deleuze’s (who, as you see, is the true theoretical Leitmotif in this analysis) implacable analysis of the Baroque from the operative drive of the fold proves of essential lucidity now:
Baroque invents the work or the endless operation. The problem is not how to finish a fold but how to continue it to the infinite. As the fold does not only affect all matters, which this way become matters of expression, according to different scales of speed and vectors (mountains, water, paper, material, living tissues, the brain) but it also determines and makes the Form appear, the infinite line of inflexion…
The Baroque does not refer to an essence but rather to a proceeding or strategy which does not stop making folds. It is this inessential process, however, that constitutes itself in a self-generated engine and unifying multiplicity, which is always identical in its changing unfolding and re-folding:
There is always a fold within the fold, just as there is a cavern within a cavern. The unit of matter, the smallest element of labyrinth is the fold, not the dot, which is never a part but a simple end on a line. Unfolding is not then, the opposite of folding but it continues the fold onto another fold… Folds of the winds, the waters, fire and the earth and underground folds in the mine’s seam. Mine seams are similar to conic curvatures; at times they end in circles or ellipsis, other times they continue into hyperbole or parabola.
Deleuze concludes laconically his geometrical, geological and topological contemplation: it is always an issue of folding, unfolding, re-folding… But the unfolding put forward by Cristina Gámez is not just about the folding of bodies, shapes and images. It is also the re-folding of that dimension, inherent to human life –that is, historical time- which is also surface effect. This becomes more clear if we review the history of representations: if the Baroque’s drive is not just mere nostalgia for a better past is because the work of making an inventory –always provisional- is something unavoidable for each generation, for every single artist who is aware of their task. But this serious task, Cristina Gámez seems to be telling us, can also –and it must- be done joyfully. Not with the vanity of official tributes or with the frivolity of “artistic homage”. But rather as one who sings while weaving at the loom or cleaning their workshop because there are works that seem to be straightforward but they really are far more complex than that, like this one. Thus Cristina Gámez invites, without further ado and with hardly concealed joy, Velázquez, Vermeer or Bernini to her workshop: that is, she invites painting to her pictures. This re-folding of time on itself is precisely –as Deleuze had it – the condition for its later unfolding, as it was for repetition in traditional manufacturing or in computer graphics. Others, instead, started where she has just started and then were fascinated by the digital world; which comes to prove that the first thing to become obsolete is narrow-mindedness.
Rose-like portraits
(…)
In the series Cortina plegada [Folded curtain] this hanging, suitably displayed, frames and leads the scene. Sometimes, the vision opens on to an empty grey background beautifully woven; two symmetrical hangings, folded up like a theatre curtain, lead to no stage at all –as one would expect- since they themselves are the scene: just a Vermeer’s side curtain, painted by Cristina Gámez and another one woven in white, grey and black. In other works, a single side curtain leads to a Roman bas-relief whose gown-clad figures seem to incarnate in their folds their full republican humanity.
(…)
At all events, we have notable developments in this rhetoric of the fold in Cristina Gámez’s latest work and here too the symbolic value of representation is remarkably inferior than its descriptive or narrative function: they are not metaphors but metonymy; it is not semantics but syntax (with its secondary appearance) that joins the sense of the story. The analogy of the fold in the material with things is quite evident: we have folds resembling heads, stones, waves, clouds, flowers, vulvas, wrinkled sheets, headgear and turbans or Zurbarán’s monk hoods and habits. But the fold is both a part of the whole, a syntactical element which is not incidental at all, and the one which articulates and makes it possible: it is the great metonymy. Its omnipresence should make it less interesting but that is not the case because it is not at all central. This too seems to confirm Deleuze.
When Cristina Gámez turns a side curtain into the issue of her work, she is generating an effect Derrida would call “decentring” through which she avoids the dominant rhetorical inertia, both in aesthetics and the rest of the values. The possibility of making margins talk should not be disdained inasmuch as creative and cognitive achievement. It does not mean it makes these pictures automatically good, but at least –as I have tried to prove- makes them “interesting”. And it is not just a productive strategy, for inverting the most black and white deeply rooted (ideological, metaphysical) hierarchy through the sole plastic exercise is no minor achievement. She also turns into a deliberate and conscious operation all the wealth of sensitive fascination which normally remains latent, alienated or repressed (which takes us back to Nietszche’s initial idea).
Are not the folds in Zurbarán’s monks, with their specific way of administering the light and volume in the picture, the ones which –de facto– generate the other worldly atmosphere? What about Vermeer’s curtains? Is it not true that they enhance the mystery inherent in the paintings through providing an ineffable aura to household well-being or to the most mundane activities? All this only becomes conscious through the rhetorical decentring of the picture’s elements and in this case becomes a lucid strategy.
We pretend not to see the folds, curtains and brocades. As if the head of the bishop, trader or condottiero they highlight were of a higher essence than the attributes which make that face deserving an illustrious portrait. At the most they have their own name or a story to tell but that is again a metonymy which takes us beyond the limits of the picture…
Cristina Gamez’s Portraits, or that masterly Neck of Woman are an empirical proof of the ontological entity of the fold, of how the surface effect accounts for the vital depth of the (old) portrait genre. Once again, the historical re-folding of the fold as a condition to creative unfolding. The occasional allusions to Velázquez’s or Leonardo’s landscape backgrounds (Portraits I and III) seem to fill this investigation with clues: in Portraits II, for instance, in the background there are the folds of the ladies and the curtains of Velazquez’s Las hilanderas, [The Fable of Arachne] seen from the perspective of another lady whose head, headdress and breast come out of the fold of the same cloth. Once again we must dissipate any relation to Arcimboldo’s mannerist illusionism: we are being told about the myth of Ariadna and the thread of life woven by the three Moiras or Parcae; and also about the way in which Velázquez presides over the eternal updating of the myth of the fold of life and death through the metaphor –it is so this time- of the thread and the weft.
But if we look closely at Portraits I and II, Fold in Mount, Fold in Valley we shall see those false linen flowers, slightly suggested with a bit of acrylic to outline the folds, opening to life.And if we have a close look at the seams which frame them, we will see rose-like portraits.
The good conscience of ornament
The discredit of the decorative as opposed to the conceptual seems to refer not only to the academy distinction between art and craft, as evident and necessary as useless at times. An opposition which is in any event strange to the (real) history of Art, for ever leaving behind or welcoming techniques and genres into the official pantheon of the Arts. Likewise, the typical opposition between figuration and abstraction (the latter as devalued from the 80s on as it was previously exalted) seems to lose weight and dilute in the passing of time, much richer in nuances than epoch discourses. This is crystal clear in Cristina Gámez’s work, through its simple efficiency in deconstructing these false dichotomies. Juan Pedro Castañeda referred in these terms to the clear move toward ornament of our artist, who he endows with an inherent interest:
Lineal ornamentation has no history, houses neither space nor time, it is a gift to nature and to geometry. We could also agree that it always refers to the same instant, a perpetual instant, coiled in itself. The taste for ornament in Cristina Gámez is related to this mechanism, it is analogous to it. Ornament is based on repetition of an image and she shows a certain liking for order, abstraction, perhaps.
But Cristina Gámez inscribes this said taste –as can be seen, traditional and modern– in a game of mirrors, in a meta-language that is increasingly richer and unexpected. Bringing in new elements or moving on to other levels of the same follows a course which is less and less foreseeable, a rationality which is barely lineal, perhaps baroque or rhizomatic. It is possible that this rhizomatic quality, as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, along with his theory of the Baroque fold and the body-language help to account for a creative work which has always fed on her own contemplation and that of others. It must be clear that Cristina Gámez has included this speculative dimension in her work with the same naturalness as when weaving or dancing, accurately and with no fuss at all.