Maribel Nazco, sensuality in metal and paper

Madrid,

Maribel Nazco’s career is not exactly short – she was born in La Palma 86 years ago, trained at the Fine Arts School in the 1980s and continues to work – but her largest exhibitions on the peninsula took place in the 1970s, so many will welcome as a discovery the works we have the opportunity to see in “Abstract Sensuality”, the exhibition now being offered by José de la Mano and which had its prologue at the last edition of ARCO, where this same room also brought some of her pieces. Its curators have long been well acquainted with the artist’s career: Isabel Tejeda and Isidro Hernández.

This solo exhibition consists of works dating back to the 1970s: metal works, which Nazco used in his early days, and also meticulous drawings related to his three-dimensional creations. They are part of a line of study that he continued in the 1980s and that led him to use copper, steel, iron, zinc and aluminium in assemblies. With them he created reliefs that, due to their curved moulding, their polish and the paradoxical soft appearance of their fragments, suggest the sensuality that gives the exhibition its title; they evoke, from a subtle ambiguity in keeping with their context, bodies that merge and express themselves from the nuances of grey and its brilliance.

Maribel Nazco. Abstract Sensuality (1970s). Jose de la Mano Art Gallery

Her childhood and youth were spent in Los Llanos de Aridane, where she was born. In order to study painting, she moved to Tenerife, where she received classes from Mariano de Cossío, Álvaro Fariña and Pedro de Guezala at their School of Applied Arts and Artistic Trades. Later, in the early sixties, she became a drawing teacher at the Central School of Fine Arts in Madrid, where her teachers were Eduardo Chicharro Briones, Enrique Lafuente Ferrari and Gregorio Toledo.

In his early days he was associated with the Nuestro Arte collective, which sought to renew artistic and literary codes in Tenerife, and he participated in several collective exhibitions until he held his first solo exhibition with Eduardo Westerdahl in 1969. It was from that moment on that Nazco undertook those material works in metal, which he was able to show at the Museo Municipal de Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the Sala Conca in La Laguna, the Ateneo in Madrid or the Galería Juana Mordó. His subsequent solo exhibitions, in the seventies and in galleries such as Ramón Durán (Madrid), Aritza (Bilbao), Vegueta y Botticelli (Las Palmas) or Sarrió y Joan de Serrallonga (Barcelona), were well received by critics, who in some cases (that of Carlos Areán, then director of the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo) referred to his creations as sculpturepainting and appreciated the high level of suggestiveness of these organic forms sketched both on paper and on metal. Maud Bonneaud wrote: These bodies have taken great moon baths, have floated and swum at night in the endless river of the Milky Way, have rolled to polish themselves in the turns of the sky.

With an obvious desire to experiment and learn, she studied Fine Arts in La Laguna in the eighties, dedicating her doctorate to delving into the procedures with which innovation could be made in the alloy of metals (she was dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts of this Tenerife university for many years), however, at that same stage, from 1985, she preferred to give her work a circular turn, back to where it had begun: she returned to dedicate herself solely to painting. However, metals did not abandon her: in series such as Icons of the city (1991) we can appreciate how the creation of illusory metallic objects served to create still lifes of urban inspiration. In this vein, his most recent project is called Garden of waste and is based on the accumulation of sediment and colour; the past eroticism has given way to the industrial imprint in an author also concerned about the environmental crisis.

This exhibition marks his return to the exhibition scene after the retrospective that TEA. Tenerife Espacio de las Artes offered him in 2012.