Exposició

Marta Cañadell

Lleida, del 21 de febrer al 15 d’abril de 2007

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NS LONGING FOR MUD

A DAY AT MARTA CAÑADELL’S STUDIOThe last time I spoke to Marta Cañadell was in a caféin Barcelona. She brought me some photographs ofthe work she was about to exhibit at that time. Theywere paintings, the majority of them not very large, orat least that was the impression I got from looking atthe photographs. In all of them the there was a fixedviewpoint from ground level. If the horizon was visibleit seemed to be observed from a very low perspective,as if the eye coincided with the level of the earth. Mist,holes and rushes were all that could be seen in thosepaintings. It seemed improbable that the artist hadstretched herself out on the ground and worked likethat, but you needed to visualise her lying there on theearth in order to try to understand it. Let’s say that theview started off so low down that the grass lookeddisproportionately large. Using this strategy meant thatbetween one blade of grass and another there was apainted sky. However, as I was saying, these paintingsconjured up another image, other than the one thatcould be seen painted, and this was none other thanthe artist herself stretched out on the ground.When, after a time, I received another call from MartaCañadell, and while I was talking to her on thetelephone, I couldn’t get those paintings out of myhead. They weren’t canvases you would remember forthe way they were painted. It wasn’t that. What madethem really difficult to forget was that point of view,sunk so deep into the earth. I even remember havingwritten something about possible friction between hereyeball and the mud. It was a long time ago and I don’treally know what the idea that made it possible for meto relate the two things was. What matters is that, thistime, after several years, I arranged to go and see herat her house. After going up to the studio, the firstthings she showed me were some small, carefully-wrapped blocks of clay. As she took off the protectiveplastic, tongues of fired, gilded clay appeared, the sizeof slices of bread. Arranged on the table, they formeda catalogue of textures. There were all kinds. Soft andundulating, rough like cork, sharp-edged like stone andfibrous like vegetable material.Just as if she was taking them from a shop window, shetold me how she was going to arrange them on thefloor of the exhibition hall. Initially, I found this difficultto imagine it. I had them in front of me, one almostright beside another. But, in fact, as I mentally composed

the installation, I began to make calculations of howmuch space each of these pieces would need around it.At that point, I managed to put more than a metre orso between one and another. Gold is like that, a littleseems a lot. We have such a high concentration ofvalue associated with the material “gold” that, evenjust to look at, too much would not necessarily beattractive. Clay, by contrast, is perhaps the least valuablematerial that is close to being fetishised. When anancient rubbish dump is found, it is usually full of thismaterial. And, if you walk through a city in India, youwill find small kiosks serving a kind of yoghurt in aclay pot, which you then throw away on to a mountainof similar pots.But let’s go back to Marta Cañadell’s studio. One wayor another, it was clay that I had in front of me — butnot clay as a material, clay as an idea of something soft.The extraordinary idea that each of these pieces showedon its surface brought them close to a photographiceffect. The soft clay had recorded the marks of a nailsunk repeatedly into it or a texture fixed on its surface,which had later been gilded. Putting clay and gold soclose together made me think of more grandiloquentthings, such as the juxtaposition of misery and glory.It is also true that I might have felt fascinated by theplasticity of those morsels, but some time previouslythat notion had lost the little credit it had had for me.I could choose to examine tactile or mythical sensations,and I chose the latter.Had I chosen to remain with the tactile sensations, I’msure that French phrase …la nostalgie de la boue wouldhave come into my head — the longing for mud, forwhen we lived mixed with the earth, not superficiallybut morally dirty, in a way we would never toleratenowadays. But in deciding not to rationalise anything,I allowed myself to go along with more complexmeanings. The truth is I even surprised myself in goingthis way. I’ve always been one of those people who saythat if something can’t be spoken about it’s better tosay nothing — Wittgenstein dixit. But I think thatconnecting Marta Cañadell’s works with the immediateworld doesn’t work. It would be very easy to do it.Immediately on leaving the studio we would be swampedby the catalogue of textures fixed on the clay but aliveand linked to the world. Cork on a tree, vegetablematerial on plants and everything in its place.It is precisely separating the texture — that is, theattribute — from the thing that supports it that makes

it possible to break over-obvious causality links. I alwaysthink that anything which reaches us sublimated mustbe desublimated, but if something comes from below,deprived or diminished, what we need to do is tosublimate it all over again. So, what does the fact thatthe clay comes covered in gold leaf mean? To put it inmore popular language, it would be like having gift-wrapped shit. And I don’t need to stop and explainwhat connects clay, or mud, and shit. Roland Barthessaid that photographed shit doesn’t stink, which is likesaying that representation captures only the skin ofthings. Or that the image can be circulated, but notthe thing itself.The problem is quite interesting. It all allows us to goback to viewing Marta Cañadell’s pieces — thesetongues of gilded clay — as objects we cannot sublimateor reduce, and this makes them strange works of art.We might say that a work of art can often be definedas an ordinary material inviting the spectator tosublimate it, and that the spectator enjoys the work inquestion through doing this job. However, this is notthe case with Marta Cañadell’s pieces. As we have beensaying since the start, these are works that oneremembers, but the reason why they are retained inthe memory is not clear. Their strength lies in aparadoxically precise sense of indeterminacy. Hers arepieces that remain hanging in limbo, debating whetheror not to be works of art.There are also other works by Marta Cañadell whichmaintain their identity by standing on a threshold. So,having finished picking up samples of De fang i d’or (Ofclay and of gold) (2004-2005), which she had placed onthe table, the artist went to the other side of the studio.That day, the mist made the studio seem even moreisolated. The modern artist’s imagination has alwaysconstructed the studio space as somewhere separatedfrom the world, a basic condition for a very particularmodel of creation. So, while she moved objects, I stoodthere amazed, looking out the windows through whichthe trees in the garden of the house could hardly bemade out. Suddenly, I was faced with a medium-sizedcanvas. The surface was treated with a style of paintingthat might recall the famous abstracts by Richter, almostan icon of abstract painting.When I thought this painting was all there was to see,the artist told me it was incomplete. A video had tobe projected on to the canvas. I didn’t get to see thesesuperimposed images, but the artist gave me a very

precise verbal equivalent that made it unnecessary tocheck the final effect of the montage. “It’s as if thelight from a window was acting on the picture —daylight.” And then she herself wondered what theeffect would be in the exhibition hall, where therewere no outdoor windows. What I couldn’t work outwere which parts of the picture would be wiped out bythe whiteness of that beam of light, which in fact wouldcome from a projector. Cohabitant (Cohabiting) (2003)blends painting and video in a way that is quite commonthese days, when the image imposes indifference aboutthe means. This indistinctness, though, can even cometo affect spectators who, in another Marta Cañadellvideo, seem to interfere with their own shadows.In other photographic images, the profile of a humanbody was also seen, as if it was doubtful whether to passthrough the door that framed the figure from the waistup. The movement of this individual might seem likea spectator entering the field of vision of the image,which, for all purposes, was a picture, and, for a fewseconds, doubting where to put himself to find the rightpoint of view. But the thing is that this picture/video,like many pictures in the history of modern art,beginning with Manet’s pictures and ending with thoseby Richter, has no associated point of view, becausethe spectator gets to it and stands there, right in frontof it. However, by not suggesting any ideal perspective,she produces an imprecise, indeterminate place. Vídeocames (Video legs) (2006), the result of this complexsuperimposition, leaves one with a feeling similar tothe picture/video we described before. It makes us doubtthe exact point from which we should look at thiswork. Let’s say it does not offer any safe place.Afterwards, I saw the trials for another installation. Infact, it was the first thing I had seen on entering thestudio, but its lightness had meant my gaze had notbeen held by its golden threads. In fact, “seen” wouldnot be the right word. Rather, I should say I made theeffort to avoid it with my body. It consisted of a few ofthose nets used to wrap bottles of wine. They weresuspended from a thread tied between two painter’seasels. To reach the table I was talking about before,you had to go underneath it. Once again, the artist wasexplaining me the dimensions this work should have.She needed many more bottles of wine to complete it.Once they were all strung up, it would be easy toimagine a delicate, infinitely expanding network, as ifan autonomous movement made it possible for those

few absent bottles to multiply. Ultimately, what I hadin front of me was no more than the basic principle ofa painting. To understand it, you had to remember theeffect a Frank Stella had in the fifties. If, for that artist,the canvas was the place where an expansive movementwas begun, it was not very different for Marta Cañadell.Because of this, you didn’t need to see any more thanthe beginning. The end, if there was one, waspredictable.Having said that, some might think this is not the rightway to look at works of art. They might say you needto see them installed at the exhibition. But I don’tthink so. I believe the most successful exhibitions arethose which do not enforce the transformation of theworks of art so they can be seen in public. A largeproportion of the art we consume has undergone atranslation process which has repressed the originalconditions in which it was produced. Criticism is nevermade of works in the studio, but rather of works in thegallery, on the market, etc. Donal Judd was alreadycomplaining about this. He said critics should maketheir assessments in the studio, and that this wouldchange things. And the same can be said ofphotographed works, although here I would not upholdan immediate view. On the contrary, I believe thatphotographs confirm certain aspects of a work that thenaked eye would not otherwise have seen.The last things I saw that day in Marta Cañadell’s studywere some slides. Once again, I was faced with gildedtongues of clay, but this time they were photographedones: some on the table, others held by a hand, and,in some cases, converted into pure surface. The resultof bringing the objective so near to the camera wasdelicate calligraphy. The notion of scale was lost,however, and those twenty-centimetre pieces mightseem to be almost a metre long. In this sense, I thoughtthat these photographs were not such a good idea. Theothers, the ones that left the clay casting a clear shadowon the table, strengthened the piece’s nature as anobject. They did not deceive. However, on the trainhome, the golden reflections of some of the slidescontained remained in my head. It is quite strange; wecreate myths about direct contact with things and thenit turns out that what we remember best is an image,the substitute for a thing.

Carles GuerraFebruary 2007

I had been waiting expectantly for the text CarlesGuerra was writing for this catalogue. I imagined themoment when I would read it, running through thoselines, and how much they were going to surprise me.Now I have the text in front of me, I have decided toshare my thoughts and feelings with you.To me it seems intense, driven with acceleration; ateach new reading it seems to change; it is impossibleto pin down, to close off a single view, just like realityitself.Perhaps I don’t identify with some words, which surpriseme, like “slices of bread”, and perhaps I don’t identifyeither with some of the content relating clay withsomething horrible, like shit. But beyond the challengeinvolved in bringing two sensitivities together, thereis a confluence.Longing for mudIt is quite strange; we create myths about directcontact with things and then it turns out that whatwe remember best is an image, the substitute for athing.Thank you, Carles.

Marta Ca adell

COHABITANT (COHABITING) (2003)

Video installationAcrylic on cotton mounted on a wooden stretcher81x116cmVideoProjection of 81x116cm

In Cohabitant, from the projection of a digitalised filmonto a painting, a series of images appear that representthe work of pictorial creation under constanttransformation. The film registers lights and shadowsin movement. The paint remains vulnerable, theprojection does not allow it its defined and static vision.The staging presents the perception of a reality that isdilated, in movement, dazzling.

DE FANG I D’OR (OF CLAY AND OF GOLD)(2004-2005)

35 piecesKilned clay and gold leaf10 x 20x 1.5cm each

De fang i d’or is a series of 35 objects made of kilnedand gilded clay. They are conceived as fragments of anidea, that, simultaneously, each one tells. They conservethe character of a chunk of clay, which is the state theywere sold in. Their shape has been manipulatedminimally. Between the clay and the action that is tobe made on it a pact of austerity is established. Thegilded surface acts like a film, like a skin, and thereforean image, making reference to the essence of pictoriallanguage and all that is visible. The shape and colourof the pieces generates connotations of a gold ingot.Clay and gold, the unloved and the valued. The dialogueis open.

VÍDEO-CAMES (VIDEO-LEGS) (2006)

Formed of a projection that has been adapted to thespace

In Vídeo-cames, the film presents the visible as a cuticle,an epidermis in constant transformation. And again,it presents the cycle as the only possible reference.

MALLES METÀL·LIQUES DAURADES(GILT WIRE MESH) (2006)

Wire mesh in the shape of bottles30 x 7.5cm (diameter) each

Gilt wire mesh in the shape of bottles, delicate to thetouch and difficult to see, become expressive.

My interests are concentrated in producing a work ofart that throbs, that is mutable, that responds to themost minimal stimulation.