In a painting, the landscape that is born under the artist’s brush can be haughty or tortuous, compact or ethereal, dimmed with light or penetrated with mystery; the important thing is that this landscape surpasses the dimension of simple representation and that is given as an apparition, an advent.

(François Cheng)

Five meditations on beauty This book by the Chinese novelist and poet François Cheng deals with the relationship between Eastern aesthetics and Western aesthetics, seeking bridges of dialogue between both cultures, where the concept of beauty stands out as a protagonist, although “aesthetics can only reach the depths of itself allowing itself to be subverted by ethics “. We could ask ourselves what link we find between the work of Nuria Guinovart and aesthetics; It is very easy to explain, since in each of his works you can see the essence of art and beauty, which, in fact, is what all artists pursue, but I do not affirm it as an idea of ​​the existence of the human being , but because other aspects that are inherent are involved, such as sensations, form, movement and visual appearance. And it is precisely from this perspective where her plastic proposals move, thanks above all, to the interiority and balance that are perceived in her paintings and recently, her ceramics.

I have been closely following the work of Nuria Guinovart for a long time, and I see that she remains coherent and faithful to her aesthetic approaches, where Abstract Expressionism remains the axis around which all her works revolve. In fact, the changes that we notice are based on adding or changing certain chromatic ranges, but always taking into account the importance of neutral colors. If in the previous exhibition entitled The Poetics of Painting, the sepia color stood out, now turquoise appears, or what is the same a combination of blue and green, which together with some large spots that occupy most of the composition and delicate black lines, make up a work where the sensation of balance is evident. However, the idea of ​​landscape that was guessed in the previous works, due to the existence of more precise forms that caused the perception of order and linearity, now fades away by focusing more on situations where certain geometric structures can be identified, and both certain previous proposals. This type of return to the past only obeys the purpose that has long pursued it, such as going beyond the reality itself, towards the intangible that allows you to freely express your concerns, reflections and doubts to achieve the necessary balance to the time to go, as Marcel Proust said: ” “a la recherche du temps perdu”“, although the physical space is not as far as it seems. In her paintings there is a double intention: on the one hand the idea of ​​empty space, due to the effects of leaving areas with gray or white tones, and therefore that the work can breathe; and the other, the perception of full space, concentrated in the incorporation of rectangular formats of different dimensions and colors, arranged horizontally as well as vertically that occupy most of the composition, but always linked to each other, giving the feeling of a some support, perceiving the idea that they form a single set, or what is the same, that of resembling and merging to obtain the desired result.

In the pictorial section we observe his interest in the technique of grattage, which implies the existence of matter that, in fact, is always present in his creative evolution, even if it is emptying the surface, where the cement is still present in his compositions, but with the difference that now the support is wood instead of the porexpan that it used habitually, and that it gave a certain sensation of lightness to the work.

… However now we discover a new way of expressing their ideals through ceramics, a pottery that allows you to enter a terrain hitherto unknown, but that serves to manifest different ways of understanding art, especially from the three-dimensional slope. The aim is to represent the world of ceramics through some indefinite figures, but related to their pictorial work, where the structural forms appear separated, as if they had a life of their own, which gives them a peculiar identity, underlined by the applied tonalities, where they predominate also turquoises and cuttlefish, as well as grays and blacks. Truly, this interest in such an ancient technique shows us that the artist never stops experimenting and that always goes in search of what she does not know enough, with the need to know more in order to demonstrate what her abilities to understand and know everything that surrounds her are.

In short, each new exhibition by Nuria Guinovart represents a way of feeling and experiencing art from a singular and innovative perspective, which makes us pay attention to its plastic proposals, which should help us to understand better, or at least we can get closer to the true essence of his painting – and now also of his pottery -, making our interest for them help us to love even more.