We have before us Clara Carvajal, author of the work with which she inaugurates today at the Espacio Valverde Gallery in Madrid. Tableau Vivant; a large wood carving based on Théodore Géricault’s famous 1819 painting, The Raft of the Medusa. We will be able to benefit from chatting with her after having seen this great project that includes the wood carving of more than 6×4 m, and a whole collection of her paper prints.
Q: A historicist work?
A: Every work is historicist; Give ten minutes to what you are writing down about this interview and you will have a note about it; Give it three months and it will be a newspaper article and let ten years pass and it will become a newspaper archive piece.
Q: I mean it is in an intentionally historicist way.
A: It is reflective and, therefore, plays with the temporal component. But what interests me is to highlight three things:
First is the fact that I take a reference work, a well-known painting, which in turn deals with a real event, which thanks to Géricault’s work has not been forgotten, and I build from there. But, let us not forget, the original work is already done and finished; I am not interested in simply reproducing it: I am not a copyist. What attracts me is to point out the distance that remains between the original historical event – a brutal human tragedy –, the painting and us; the tragedy that occurred, the way it was perceived in its time and the way we see it today. When exploring these different readings I see a tendency to lose the human reference, something that is common to many works of art today. I remember a moment when I was aware of this when, years ago, I saw in Beirut an impressive tapestry about the massacre in the Shatila refugee camp, based on the original work by Dia al Azzawi that is kept in the Tate in London. Now, Lebanon is sadly fashionable, but when I was working there on another project, four years ago, it was not like that. So, let’s say that those types of tragedies had been blurred, relegated in what we called history. When I saw the work I went from contemplating an artistic piece, trying to appreciate its aesthetic merit, to visualizing the drama it narrated. I find it motivating to think that we artists can do something to draw the viewer’s attention to those human elements of our coexistence, so often frustrated. Leave room when contemplating the works for something more than just aesthetic production, which is also very important but I don’t think it should be exclusive.
Q: Protest art is not fashionable.
A: He’s on his way back. With tortuous approaches, as if we didn’t want to let him back in. But by human component I do not only mean what could be called politics. There is something else; It is the presence of man and the elements of him, which include sensitivity and thought.
Q: And the rest of the points you mentioned?
A: The second is the presence of the artist. If we want to take seriously the difference between Artificial Intelligence and Art, we must promote the incorporation of the artist into the work. We must make this present not only intellectually but also in the material execution. I carve wood and stamp paper. Both things can be done industrially, mechanically, but the difference in the final product, the quality achieved, is very different from that obtained by doing it by hand. I carve by hand in my studio, I also stamp by hand on a die I have there, and after having done many tests I prefer to continue like this.
Q: But it is only a matter of time until machines improve and manage to imitate the quality of human production.
A: As long as it’s just a matter of imitating the artist, I have no problem. Although, today, we are far away. And if it comes, let’s enjoy it while we can.
Q: And the rest?
A: To emphasize these elements of human participation in the work, I have made an unusual intervention in the wood carving, eliminating several faces of the original characters that appear on the raft. With this, I intend to motivate the viewer to ask themselves; where are the faces of those people? I do not need more. That and when I use extras to take the place of the painted faces, the spectators themselves are aware that the figures they see are, above all, beings of flesh and blood.
Q: And on stamped papers?
A: I see you’re paying attention! Yes, there are no gaps in the papers like in the wood, nor do real people appear. What there is is a red circle, a call to attention, like a traffic light, which also allows me to play with the aesthetics of the whole.
Q: A performance?
A: What more would I like! I am not a performing artist; We do not invite the public to peek through the gaps to motivate their participation. No; There is a work that had a great impact on me by a deceased Iranian artist, Farideh Lashai; I am now aware of how much she touched me when I saw her for the first time at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran. It was then shown at the Prado Museum in 2017. The artist uses the engravings of Goya’s The Disasters of War to display them, one next to another, on a large black wall and go over them with a spotlight. The faces of the executed had been erased from the copies of the engravings and when the spotlight illuminated them they reappeared. It was something spectral, very suggestive and that corresponded very well both with the title of the work and with the myopia that affects us regarding that human element that I miss in many works of art. The work is titled; When I count it is only you,…. But when I look there is only a shadow.
I think that this loss of human references is something deeply rooted in modern Western art. And it also seems to me that the absence of the human being that follows is one of the great losses of Art. So I like to bring together in this project a humanist theme, an artisanal production and some flesh and blood participants. It is a way of recovering those humanist elements.
Q: I remember the work; It was very shocking. And this form of presentation? It is almost an ecclesiastical vault.
A: No; For me it is more of an archaic, caveman element. I like to think of it in terms of the Altamira Caves. Something that brings us very close to some origin, and where there is no doubt about the intervention of the hand of man. I like that you can contemplate it by immersing yourself in the space it occupies.
Q: Interesting.
A: Do you mind if I tell you a curious anecdote about faces and the anonymity of faces? To take away some of the drama, since the entire production of this project has been a source of excitement and satisfaction for me and my team and nothing depressing or dark.
I nod, and continue;
A: This street in the gallery is called Valverde, but it was originally called Victoria Street. It seems that a young gentleman was hanging around after a granddaughter, Don Juan de la Victoria Bracamonte, who lived nearby. One night when he ventured excessively around the young granddaughters’ house, some cloaked figures, covering their faces, came out and shot him down. At last, with one foot on it, they proclaimed; Be ashamed, the Victories have defeated you! And the people who had blocked his way were the granddaughters of Don Juan de la Victoria.
Q: Lovely story! It seems like this place is meant to play with people’s anonymity.
A: Yes, destiny; In some ways it’s a timely coincidence.
Q: And the fact that the wood carving and the paper prints are shown together?
A: I have been promoting what I call the biology of the image for years. I think we are very stingy with images because we live in their abundance. Cinema has taught us to condense many images into the same medium; That is what cinema originally consists of; On the other hand, I explore what happens when we see the same image stopped, on different supports. I use the same images and present them in different media, materials and digital. But the same image. In extremis, we are accustomed to encountering an image, such as that of a chair, in many different media and we recognize it as such, as the same image. I would love to make a catalog like those in department stores, where we could see the image of a chair in all the formats they use; paper, video, digital screen, cardboard, billboard, photography, fabric… You name it!
That is why, in my latest projects, I have presented the images I work with, one next to another, in wood, on paper, in photographic format and even in literary form; with texts. I’d like to make something with fabric, too.
Q: And in the end, what do you value most about the work?
A: The hours I spend with her. These large format works require a lot of work. In this there is more than a year of exclusive and intense work; a standard workday dedicated entirely to this project for more than twelve months. Dedicated, I mean, to carving and stamping with my hands. This is something that gives you a very significant proximity to the work. It is not the result of a lucky one-off occurrence that requires nothing more to be done. There is work accumulated based on hours, in the old Marxist sense of the term, which seems to no longer apply as a measure of value in art.
Q: One last question; There is a loose piece, a free vers. I think you told me it’s a fishbowl…
The interviewee finally laughs:
A: A loose vers, yes: I like the expression. Look, I recognize that this is something that some people don’t get; It catches them off guard. But the whole work is going to be dislocated! It is a fish tank full of aquatic life. A kind of song to life; positive and hopeful. I really enjoyed making it because it is also carved and printed in several overlapping colors. To do that in woodcut there are several ways; I have chosen the one with the lost iron. It is a process in which there is no turning back and each step is irreversible, it is about stamping each of the colors as you carve the necessary hole following your drawing on the wooden board, so that the desired color appears. In the end, the wood simply disappears and is unusable; The stamping cannot be reproduced again.
Q: Use and throw away?
A: We don’t throw anything away here; there is the carved plate; but if.
Q: And what is its meaning?
A: Conceptual? This project is an immersion in time to connect with events from more than a century ago. To do that you have to open a tunnel that allows you to move from one context to the other, from the current to the original. Go through symbols and meanings. The fish tank is baroque, more so than the original painting, which has a somewhat more sober realistic romanticism. But that’s why they go on top of each other. Let’s say that the fish tank is a digression in that time tunnel, but towards the bottom of the sea. The holes, the faces, the red circles, some elements that I have carved within the scene, sea crabs, and the fish tank, are the elements that provide dynamism and that give it a life of its own, demanding visual attention in the directions I am looking for.
Q: I can only refer to how the sheets printed separately are diluted; They look like oriental drawings that you have arrived at along a path of decomposition of this monumental piece.
A: That’s the best compliment you could give me. Thank you so much.
P: To you, to you; and good luck with the exhibition.
Teo Millán,
Madrid, November 1, 2023.
