Laura Gibellini Mayaou, between soil and sky

Madrid,

Soon he will have been a decade since, in the 2016-2017 academic year, the Madrid artist Laura F. Gibellini obtained one of the scholarships of the Academy of Spain in Rome and developed, during her Italian stay, the atmospheres and interruption project, a wall intervention in which a multiple straight lines were split from a metaphorical sun, as a light lines several times interrupted. These wisely arranged empty (minimum gesture, maximum effect) were responsible for the rhythm and visual attraction of the work, dominated in their shades by beige and soft green, usual colors on the Roman facades of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that contributed to providing the whole of a certain intimidity. An intimidity that was the time, air and light that could be experienced inside the pantheon, because this author works seeking to capture the intangible.

His works have to do with the concept of place, with our ways of relating to him and the conventions that have been handled when representing it, especially in which a space has liquid and unstable: the atmospheric and temporal conditions that determine our idea of the environment from its mutability and that, in turn, are clearly related to life.

From that perspective we could understand the piece Mayaou in bluewhich three years ago presented in the program Derived of the Santander Banco Foundation. It was a graphic work that he put in relation to his daughter’s scribbles (justly called Maya) and images of the atlas of the sky that represent the Pleiades: the micro and the macro. He was part of a series, also called Mayáutica, in which he used to draw the little girl, made between her two and five years, to investigate the act of drawing lines on the role and about the mechanisms of that discipline, that of the drawing: her gestural aspect and her potential to capture a vitality of which other techniques less open to spontaneity perhaps lack. That potential would allow him to practically transcend the two dimensions, as he tested in Atmospheres and interruptions.

Since then, Gibellini has been shaping this proposal, to which the Nieves Fernández Gallery now provides. It is called “bright moon”, in reference to one of the gathered pieces: a drawing on coal paper in which the artist transcribed the title of a painting made by Maya as she wrote it on the same canvas.

That name of Mayaútica From the project, which Ricardo Horcajada received from the university professor, keeps evident with the name of the girl, but its derivatives go much further: of Greek origin, designates the practices of midwives or midwives, conceived, as art, and also the method that Socrates used to invite his students to discover knowledge that they already beat in them. On the other hand, Maya is equally the name of one of the seven Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, who was convicted by Zeus to sustain the weight of the world on his shoulders for all eternity. Moved by the suffering of his daughters before that destiny, the God of heaven made them stars so that they could be with him.

In this Madrid sample, open until July 25, we can see several of the series that integrate this extensive proposal, based on the study of a facet of drawing as a path of knowledge: the scribble, the gesture, its ties with writing …

Laura F. Gibellini. Brightness moon. Nieves Fernández Gallery

The three works on coal paper that make up Appealances of Venus By Captain Cookthe same papers that were used during the elaboration of the central works of Mayaúticaalso exposed in Nieves Fernández.

These roles were later intervened, giving rise to brands that refer to the transit of Venus as was registered by Captain Cook. In this way, we are not only in the face of reused work materials, but against supports in which the image is built by subtraction: the drawings become visible by the elimination of the brand, thus teaching us the absence as a form of presence. That gesture and that tension between the visible and what is not very interested in Gibellini, as we said.

Eclipse 1764 It is composed, however, two blown crystals and acid engravings. They represent one of the first total eclipses of sun that were registered, schematically. This work gives continuity to another line of work of this author in the use of the glass as a means to explore cosmological phenomena that, not belonging to our earthly plane, clearly affect it.

The eclipse is here a metaphor of the beginning and the end, of what is hidden and revealed, and allows in this work to establish an analogy between the movements of the Astros and the gestures of Maya drawing: the latter, as the celestial displacements, leave traces and have an impact on their environment.

Eclipses, according to several studies, affect the behavior of animals, nature, and about ourselves; They cross biology and affections.

Gibellini explains that he is interested in introducing elements that are not exclusively of the order of the visible or the everyday, but that nevertheless are fundamental to understand our existence and our place in the universe. The eclipse, with its symbolic power and its real effect, offers a way of thinking about our connection with what transcends us, with the cycles that cross us, even if they are not always visible.

In blown glass and acid engraving also performed Venus Transit 1759: Two diagrams that represent the transit of Venus observed that year, again attending to the records of Captain Cook and astronomer Charles Green during his expedition around the world, raised, among other purposes, with that of observing this astronomical phenomenon.

The study of the Venus traffic made it possible to calculate the distance between the planets, and between the Earth and the Sun, with greater precision, and better understand the constitution of the Solar System.

Gibellini also links here the astronomical phenomena with what is close to us; It becomes part of them: through this work I am interested in exploring the link between the scientific observation and the subjective experience of being in the world: how these astronomical events allow us to think about our existence not only from the particular, but from a broader perspective, in which we recognize ourselves as part of a major whole, a cosmos to which we inevitably belong, which affects us and to which we can affect us and to which we can affect us and to which we can affect us.

Back to Japanese paper, Red 190521, Blue 190521 and Black 050621 were the starting point of Mayáutica. Each of them starts from a scribble made by Maya being very small: Gibellini stressed graphically what was around his strokes, articulating a new composition that puts the focus on the peripheral, usually inadvertent.

Defined that composition, it was climbed to the dimensions of Maya herself at the time of drawing, and then manually transcribed with that coal paper on Japanese paper. The fruit is an image in which the visible is not the brand itself, but the space around (the absence).

Each of the pieces is completed with a color pantone, extracted from Maya’s original drawings. Thus, the child gesture and not mediated reappears not only in its indirect footprint, but through the color of the original brand, as an emotional and visual trace. The intimate and the most vast are overlapping again.

Other works in “bright moon” arise from the rendering of a flat drawing, with the aim of imagining what it would be like if it had volume and devinated cognitive object; they emulate false lithographs in post-psThey combine the traditional tapestry and the Turkish knot to integrate one of Maya’s drawings with one of his first writings, represent the letters of this name in neon tubes or transcribe illustrations of the girl from the story Almendrita.

The vital and cosmic energy seem to reveal their confluences in the production of Gibellini.