Almudena Lobera in the kingdom of silence

Madrid,

Now close to two decades of experience, Almudena Lobera became known after winning one of the awards of the call then called Temptationsfrom the ESTAMPA Fair, and with two National Awards from the Marbella Engraving Museum, in 2007 and 2009; Since those years, this Madrid artist, with a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University and specialized in graphic design, has been addressing in her work the meaning and modes of production and perception of those images that represent fantasies, non-visible realities or mental creations. , a product of the unconscious or melancholy. In this endeavor, he has used a disturbing, ambiguous and suggestive iconography, both for its aesthetic value and for its conceptual meaning: he has used, as references or as an integral part of his own works, objects from the past, elements from his environment, pieces related to the notion of habitat… elaborating from them compositions open to diverse readings. The viewer becomes the “editor” of his creations, and is invited to reevaluate his first perception over and over again.

Given that, for Lobera, we are surrounded by picture-images in their traditional sense, she has often chosen to turn drawing into a tool to directly express her thoughts, ideas that, because they are intangible and unconscious, can provoke aesthetic experiences with the aim of disturbing .

Almudena Lobera. Rest. Parra & Romero Gallery

Until next November 9 we can visit what is his first exhibition at the Parra & Romero gallery in Madrid: it is called “Rest” and consists of works in which he has brought his investigations into deconstruction, reinterpretation and the denial of language to the terrain of silence, relating it to the codes of non-verbal communication and listening conceived as an act of care, towards others and towards oneself.

Drawing, installation, sculpture and performance are the media in which he has chosen to deploy silent presencesalthough sometimes not free of musical connotations: Rest is the musical concept for said silence, in English; in the notations, it would be equivalent to the Latin term Tacetwhich refers to the fact that a voice or an instrument continues to be present in a performance, but without emitting sound, an idea that inevitably reminds us of the piece 4’33” by John Cage, in which that silence can accommodate multiple meanings. These references serve the artist to establish possible differences between forms of silence: that linked to rest and a passive absence, and that associated with an active pause in which intentions fit. In musical art itself, for example, sound rest has its own value: as emptiness has in sculpture, a structural value, and Lobera’s pieces in this gallery, those silent presencesthey project the wills of their author.

Almudena Lobera. Rest. Parra & Romero Gallery
Almudena Lobera. Rest. Parra & Romero Gallery

Silence, therefore, may or may not imply rest, in the same way that the latter may or may not entail silence, a notion whose absoluteness, by the way, is impossible, because in both the rest and the silence, there exists a level of extra-musical communication. Ironically, Lobera formulates, sound is our way to get closer to complete silence, as the Fourier transformthe mathematical basis that makes it possible to calculate the inverse of each element that makes up a sound wave, giving rise to its cancellation. In this way, what noise-canceling headphones achieve is to filter out the ambient sound and emit its negative wave.

Lobera’s pieces in “Rest” seem to connect with the concept that in certain Eastern societies, such as Japan, there is a vacuum in all its variants, including sound: its materiality is not denied, compared to the Western notion that it is associates with nothing. Although it is difficult to translate the Japanese concept Haragei -literally it would be belly art-, what it really refers to is the ability to say without saying, to make oneself understood from silence; In these countries the public does not usually complain about the absence of dialogue in cinema, because they are aware that signifiers exist in the moments when there are no words. In this supposed nothingness, potentially all sounds are found.

Almudena Lobera. Rest. Parra & Romero Gallery
Almudena Lobera. Rest. Parra & Romero Gallery

Almudena Lobera. “Rest”

PARRA & ROMERO

C/ Claudio Coello, 14

Madrid

From September 12 to November 9, 2024

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