CLARA CARVAJAL MAKES US THINK WITH A LIVING TABLEAU
The creator transforms into a mark, a trace, an impression – the monumental epic painting of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa at Espacio Valverde.
The artist Clara Carvajal (Madrid, 1970) has manually carved into thirty-one boards the iconography of the catastrophic survival of the shipwrecked from the French frigate Méduse off the Mauritanian coast in July 1816. These are woods assembled into two convex pieces that envelop and exceed the scale of the viewer, making them part of the suffering of these adrift men, abandoned to the omnipotence of the sea. Even the open gaps in some of their faces invite us to take their place. Both low-relief frameworks are part of an artistic process, as they constitute the matrix of the twenty-eight woodcuts that complete the living tableau, breaking down this iconic image of Romanticism into disconnected aesthetic fragments. The style is deliberately primitive or naive, as well as the alternation of basic monochrome colors, in the manner of José Guerrero. The artist has crafted the work over months, in a physical and intellectual effort that should make us
reflect on the confrontation between a human creation and one made by a robot.
Precisely, Carvajal uses a historical fact transformed by an “old master” into a universal symbol, after being a political matter, to allude to the dehumanization of art, to the current loss of the human reference. Ortega y Gasset already addressed the issue of the dissolution of the symbolic nature of art in the avant-garde and how such insignificance alienates the viewer. But now we witness the dehumanization of the artist himself with the unstoppable advance of artificial intelligence in creative processes, and not only as a tool to aid flesh-and-bone artisans, but as a creative entity in itself, capable of simulating human artistic thought and sensitivity. Can software replace plastic artists? For that, they must be endowed with intentionality, be capable (detached from human energies) of directly involving the viewer and disconcerting them…
Thus, Clara Carvajal leaves us a message in a loose print that evokes the seabed, the aquatic animals that regenerate these depths: nothing stops even though people die and ships sink. Yes, we are all going to be shipwrecked, hence the forging capacity of the human being is inextinguishable, whatever the channel. Until January 20th.
Carmen Escardó.
