Lion,
8,068,807,218 was the number of inhabitants that the Earth had when María Luisa Fernández completed the preparation of the exhibition that she is currently presenting at the MUSAC in León; Now it will be substantially larger and in a few years, according to the Fibonacci sequence, the spiral that includes the progression of the sum of two natural numbers and their following ones, will have multiplied exponentially (except for tragic events). These world population figures have been giving titles to the artist's exhibitions for years (since her last solo exhibition, in 2018, they have increased by 460 million) and the Fibonacci spiral itself has also been built in which, since the last weekend, offered in that Leonese center, underlining its potential relationship with another spiral, the one that contains the measures of beauty: the divine proportion or the number of gold, a metal in which the Leonese understands that the system of economic overexploitation current converts blood.
This project, curated by Sergio Rubira and open until October, features Fernández's most recent production: drawings and sculptures, although mainly the latter, which the artist wants to turn into pieces that are anything but self-absorbed, into works linked to a nearby reality, against which they take a position, and that appeal to the viewer and can arouse both emotions and an invitation to reflect beyond the context of the museum rooms (without this intention necessarily entailing the belief that art has sufficient capacity to give rise to to social improvements).
The aspect of reality that this author emphasizes has to do with ecology and the uncertainties that the environmental situation poses for the future, and her way of approaching it can be linked to that which, at the beginning of her career in the eighties , deployed in the Artistic Surveillance Committee (CVA) that he was a member of along with Juan Luis Moraza: he then tried to pay attention to issues that tended to remain out of focus, questioning the functioning of museums and the so-called art system, and his focus was both conceptual and playful; However, her creations from those years showed an attachment to materiality while, among the current ones, we will find some designed to disappear, such as various foam sculptures.
Precisely one of his series from the nineties has recently been continued: it is about Ideal artists, in which he converted the geometric shapes typical of the circular graphs of statistics into sculptural elements. He made them in wood and painted them in oil in black or white, finally arranging them upright, superimposed or on mattresses, again, made of foam rubber, giving rise to shapes that did not refer so much to human shapes as to their proportions.
The regular forms derived from statistics constituted for her a tool to establish models or prototypes of perfection, but they maintained precarious balances when they became sculptures raised like columns, while, when they were lying on mattresses, they did not quite fit, since Their scales did not correspond and the circle seemed impossible to close. In the MUSAC, those pieces have been hung from the ceiling, so that they gain weight in the space and incorporate a monumental dimension into their approach.
They are no longer painted, because their black color and the iridescence that we see in them are the result of the carbonization process that takes place when the surface of the wood with which they are made is burned. Yes, three decades ago, the Ideal artists They alluded to the way in which the idea of artistic genius had been constructed, and to the way in which Fernández herself positioned herself in relation to those stereotypes that she understood to be exclusionary as reductionist, now, hanging in an apparently insecure way by threads, the questions that they contain expand their scope to highlight what artists do in relation to what is happening in the world, where they are situated with respect to data that, like the one that gives the title to this exhibition, could anticipate a collapse.
Issues of general impact whose validity does not end are also handled in the project Crownsmade up of works made with wood waste that allude to circulatory systems in a decomposed state and that we can associate with some of the drawings that have arrived in León: anatomical representations in which bones and muscles have evaporated so that only the arteries and blood vessels remain. veins, but in which, if we stop carefully, we will notice the silhouettes of wild animals that seem to move nervously across the sheet of paper.
These silhouettes, sometimes of beings on the verge of extinction, fill other compositions on paper as if they were shadows, ghosts of what they were: the absences or voids to which they seem to give rise are also suggested in another group. of new sculptures made by piling up methacrylate sheets that have been placed in a circle at the entrance to the room, in the same way that the symbols of alchemy are arranged, and that the visitor will have to cross or go around. These plates sit on bases whose legs end in a point, as if they could be nailed into the ground, recalling the torsos of those vigilant lionesses that have been injured by their supports, while the wings of some mythical birds that rest on the wall They resemble trophies drawn with a knife. Both animals, in turn, allude to the protective idols of a distant time and, when executed in the aforementioned foam rubber, they will acquire a different color over time until they crumble and become, not ruins, but waste.
Under the influence of art that was born without postulates (street art, naïve art, art brut), Fernández, who has also devoted a good part of his artistic work to teaching, often rereads Bruno Latour, who proposed new relationships between society and nature not based on dualism or the supremacy of the first over the second.
María Luisa Fernández. “8,068,807,215. “Blood in gold”
MUSAC
Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24
Lion
From June 8 to October 13, 2024