Virginia Bersabé, old age and tenderness

Almería,

In his paintings he seeks to shelter what is in the body of memory, of lived history, vulnerability and strength and uses his grandmother’s skin to rebuild her past and other women of her generation, directly but also warmly.

The Cordoba artist Virginia Bersabé, protagonist of the exhibition summer of the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Realism. Murec de Almería with Rosario de Velasco, offers on human physicalness a double and resounding double look, turning it into a storyteller, and there is nothing casual that has taken as the axis of its creations the figure of the older woman, which allows her to talk about beauties that we sometimes refuse to see and of individual and collective female identities.

He likes to look where the majority does not do it: in moments and fragments of the body from which many look away, in the authentic expressities that go beyond the particular and that escape the canonical beauty and the threshing paths. The artist explained very well when he joined our signs, in 2018: Old age and their diseases are for many a moment that must be saved, hidden. I believe, however, that it is then when human heritage is best expressed, the identity built throughout a life, fragility and beauty of our bodies. I don’t want to be the same before and after each painting. I always want to be on the edge of the precipice investigating with them and with the painting. From the painting, I claim these issues and those stages of life to which society usually turns off the spotlights. I don’t want to have filters, because life does not have them.

The production of this author arises, to a large extent, from family research and on its closest environment in a first phase, but we can consider its grandmother, called María del Valle, such as everyone’s grandmother, because accidents on their skin, their tone and their roughness are those of ours and surely point to the past and future of anyone. He has also portrayed other elders of his surroundings, in many cases sick of Alzheimer’s: his memories are then doubly in the skin and not in the head, hence each body and its colors, fortunately never homogeneous, are very valuable. Virginia is obsessed with those shades that only age.

Virginia Bersabé. About the stars. Rollebrar project, 2017

The exhibition that now stars in Almería, entitled “You talked about permanence” and curated by Juan Manuel Martín Roble They rise like love and care that elderly people provide and who require themselves. They are born of childhood memories and current moments, from the will to honor memory and the present, and in some cases (Tell what handkerchief you want of 2020, Without title of 2018) the biological body and that of painting seem to merge under the submission over time.

Underlining the links between space-time and old age, this artist has turned that aging into a story that concerns us, affecting that it modifies our way of perceiving and understanding ourselves, ourselves and the rest, and that it is part of the irremediable and necessary temporal logic of any life. In In his mirror (2016) or Roof stamps (2022), the elderly bodies in front of the mirror seem oblivious to themselves, affected by the decades in the corporeal and the affective; Ultimately, by confronting the viewer with the deterioration of others, Bersabé places us equally in front of our reflection, in the face of faces that must be very familiar and that even more will be; Given the need to be recognized so that age is not injured.

The compositions of this artist speak of disability and at the same time of dignity, of the moment in which the presence is I already remember. Close the Monumental Tour And you will kiss your time forehead (2017), metaphor at a time of old age and painting.