Desvelo (Wakefulness)
by Celina Eceiza
Curated by Carla Barbero
Celina’s work offers an experience rarely seen in contemporary art: peace of mind. Each new installation effortlessly protects us from reality, the bureaucracy of relationships and certain kinds of artistic logic. She describes her philosophy for achieving this as ‘nothing can go wrong’, which she applies with the sterling belief of an outlaw. She simply sets her body in motion; there are no predetermined images, just perceptions that take shape as she acts directly on the surface. Her practice begins with drawing but only after twelve years of non-stop work has it taken centre stage, albeit in this exhibition to ghostly effect. Charcoal drawings occupy a wall on an inhuman scale, a visual creeping vine of creatures and situations that bloom throughout the space. The lines vary in thickness, some of the longer ones threaten to lose their way only to then reconnect with the general figurative flow. Not that said figures are devoid of ambiguity. Alienated from stylistic and contemporary concerns, both innocent and perverse, they exercise their right to be bad, as the artist puts it.
If images can dream, then Celina’s suffer from insomniac hallucinations, and some, like shadows, echo vigorous physical movements. We see a group of creatures that emanate their own light apparently talking to one another in front of legs that pierce the ceiling, while in a corner there is a lemon tree with withered branches but heavily laden with fruit, watched over by a designer oven bird. In contrast to her previous exhibitions, in which canvases take precedence, here the painting is also sculpture and vice-versa. Thus her work reflects her experimentation with the body in the space, in contact with the materials, caught up in the frenzy of making. She has now mastered other elements that have been appearing in her work for some time, from the deformed basketry in her exhibition El diablo está en una flor (The Devil in a Flower, 2018), or the dough/bread forms in La conquista del reino miedos (The Conquest of the Realm of Fear, 2019) and more recently in Villa Celina (2021) and La vida terrenal reconquista al soñador (Earthly Life Reclaims the Dreamer, 2022). But there are also new challenges: one aspect she seems to have wrestled with is the muscular tone of the pieces, caught between heft and a flaccid texture. In addition to plaster – a material traditionally associated with intermediary sculptural processes and caring for wounded bodies – each work has different objects at its core selected to make it more solid.
Perhaps, like me, you might be surprised by a reference the artist has mentioned on several occasions: the artwork The Store (1961) by Claes Oldenburg. In it, Oldenburg, continuing his critique of consumption and self-promotion, created an installation that embodied the spirit of the expert commercial artist: a store for himself in which he could show everything he’d ever made. And yet, when I look at photographs, I see a young Claes standing among a number of small and mid-sized sculptures, an endless jumble of things, some of which we can make out, like the slice of cake in his hands, and others we can’t. This act of laying oneself bare is very relevant to Celina. The naked image is, paradoxically, a space filled with pieces and stimuli, albeit with different motivations. It’s not just about showing everything one makes but also the related instability, like when she says that she doesn’t know how to make sculptures; what she does is try to make everything self-sustaining. Instability as a virtue, like the physical act of drawing, which is closer to shifting psychedelia than a fixed idea. This is also true of the night gallery where the paintings veer between light and shadow. Using chlorine directly on the canvas, the painting comes into being through erasure; the cloth disintegrates, the colours fade but it only gleams more brightly for it. This is no longer painting with layers, the colour itself is liquid. Some of these experiments could be seen in Mexico and Mar del Plata this summer in Personas que creo haber visto (People I think I’ve seen) and Algunos cuerpos no tienen sombra (Some Bodies have no Shadows), respectively. In these alchemical paintings and drawings, nakedness is all.
One might say that in this new chapter, Celina answers many questions with cryptic answers and it is her expansive, total vision that makes everyday things seem so flamboyant. Desvelo (Wakefulness) harbours creatures who live in harmony with uncertainty, who owe nothing to anyone and if there is a logic that connects the pieces, it isn’t verbal. It’s like memory; much as we might strive to organize them meaningfully, the fact is that memories are fragmentary. Celina’s work seems to shy away from narrative principles, images appear and come together through mysterious acts associated with the dynamics of perception and making. Of us, their guests, Celina’s universes demand connection rather than concentration. Everyone knows, I read somewhere, that far from being solemn entities, human emotions and experience contain their fair share of absurdity.