Sonia Navarro in Alcalá 31, with patterns and roots

Madrid,

Until next July, the Alcalá 31 of the Community of Madrid presides over a huge wool tapestry prepared with the pieces of that material that Sonia Navarro was able to obtain from one of the old Lorca factories after the earthquake of 2011; Under him, also large pieces of heavy Esparto rise symbolically and gain lightness when arranging on wall and not on the ground.

There are two of the most overwhelming creations among which are part of “borders and territories”, a exhibition that reviews the journey of this Murcian author since 2000 and that has been curated by María de Corral and Lorena Martínez de Corral. The territory where it was born, that of Puerto Lumbreras, its family roots and the artisan techniques of the past to whose preservation she contributes, since those beginnings, the foundations of her work have been, in which she constantly dialogues the manual procedures and traditions of the workshops with contemporary plastic language. In relation to the aforementioned Esparto, he explained the artist who interests him from the man who goes to the field to pick it up –To do so you have to have impressive wisdom, and if one year it is not collected, the following year it does not grow and the earth deserted– Until the tasks of who stains him, wets him and cooks him and that of women (less and less, and less young) who sew it. In his words: It is in those processes where I feel that I fit.

Together with Esparto and Lana, in the projects gathered here, various recycled elements will come to our path for which he finds second life or the felt and rubber protector and, above all, references abundant to the women of his family – their grandmothers were embroidery, and for them the work with fabrics was not only a trade, but part of his life, an activity to which they provided sacrifice and dedication – already Tetraplejia, and whose memory is present in a good number of works related to the impossibility of the movement or the need for corporal coat. In short, these works contain many layers of reading: they combine memory, with a sometimes autobiographical and other collective aspect, and also modernity.

It was one of its earliest awards (that of the plastic arts circuits of the Community of Madrid, then the BMW or a scholarship of the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome would arrive) that allowed it to acquire some more than twenty years ago an industrial sewing machine that would open a new era in its production -in that edition of the call it was also awarded FOD, which has collaborated with it in some jobs. When he obtained that Roman scholarship, corresponding to the 2011-2012 academic year, he could not take it to Italy, but that is why he stopped drawing the city’s strata with hand embroidered thread, as we will see in Alcalá 31.

In the center of the lower floor of the room, their-Jaula dresses have been located, which refer to women who, due to their circumstances of poverty or wealth, entered centuries ago in religious life (their high necks also allude to the impossibility of movement) and not far from them we will contemplate a colorful dress and some sandals that the artist took at the end of one of her performances and that did not let her Allusion to the immobility of women in society in certain contexts.

Particularly beautiful are their reinterpretations of the jarapas, in source bright colored carpets that were made in family artisan looms from wool remains or old rags (rags). Navarro has used cotton waste in them: he could not choose their colors, and neither their measures: as its grandmothers, it has used the material available without wasting it and has managed to find in that use a deserved form of beauty.

Sonia Navarro. Borders and territories. Alcalá 31

Esparto would introduce him in his work fifteen years ago, and contributes a lot to his aesthetics: his own smell and a basic relationship with everyone’s past; In Roman times it was already used to transport cereal and that use survived to the sixties of the last century. Since the 1990s he has known a certain recovery thanks to decorative trends, but the artist wanted to claim with her great compositions on the wall work of the women who work in despite their hardness (she does not admit the treatment with machines), in addition to evoking the female ajuares that decorated the houses of the villages.

She handled it on a frame, on the ground and with the help of the aforementioned Fod, checking how the fact that the material was more or less humid had a tidal results and remembering the folds of Spanish painting, as present in the portraits of Zurbarán friars.

To the experiences of his brother, they also refer crutches elaborated with soft materials or a mannequin of extensive metal arms.

And on the upper floor of Alcalá 31 new examples of their rich and alternative employment of materials are awaited, from their gaze to the teachers and their willingness to collaborate with artisans from Spain and Portugal -I hope not the last of their trade.

For this exhibition, two textile pieces have produced in which it has incorporated straps made by the talabartera of its people, which when animal garrisons are no longer required for protections for the trunks of the trees and jute necklaces for the goats. They surround wool, Spanish and Portuguese, which in the past export in very high amounts and today lives very low hours (it is estimated that 90% of the Spanish wool is wasted). These creations are titled The quiet life and The restless lifein reference to a celebrated composition of Zurbarán.

In front of them we will see plates intervened with views of Rome and Madrid, images that he found in the press, in the trail … and that in this way was his own, remembering his own walks in those cities. Flâneur It is entitled just a piece made with embroiderers in Lorca silk; With his workshops he seeks to collaborate Navarro, aware that when one closes he does not open again. Its activity remains, to some extent, thanks to the demand for Holy Week.

In this field it is very difficult to embroider according to straight lines, which generates a particular vibration in works like this, which some will associate the banks of the balconies.

Other works have been done in PVC, remembering the colorist abstractions of José Guerrero and Miguel Ángel Campano, or having rubber and felt pieces about wool again of our country and lusas; The fragments of manual activity, even with their threads hanging, will constantly come out to our path, for example, on a triptych, based on a text by their gallery owner in T20, Nacho Ruiz, for the “mystical” sample. His tones invoke Velázquez, Zurbarán and Goya, always from the pie and the tribute to textile waste. For one of these pieces he won the BMW Painting Prize, whose jury was very aware that a brush to paint is not necessary.

In many of its lines, as in the embroiders or in the fruits of the work of the talabartera, Navarro finds “the forms of my patterns, my routes, my boundaries and my memoirs.”