Page 72 - Ruth Morán

irony” turns the artistic experience into “any- thing goes”, which is a way of avoiding all sense of responsibility: in the end, even if the work of art is embarrassingly shoddy it can always be argued that this was done on purpose. It´s start- ing to become a moral obligation to “call it as you see it”, and if we decided to do that, we´d have to admit that many creative speculations around us simply reflect impotence, although of course this impotence is camouflaged with extraordinary skill. Michael Fried´s prediction that modern painting would cease to exist once it became theatrical (or a hypnotic rendering of an already existing object), has already come true. Yet Ruth Moran, with an iron will, keeps painting on a flat surface, searching for unusual imagery, while at the same time managing to move away subtly from minimalism as it was analyzed by Wollheim. Wollheim said it was a way of creating art by letting the materials be themselves, in which decision-making and dis- mantling becomes more important, along with a sterile feeling: the rhetoric of destruction3.
in modern times has become an emblem or even a myth, is less rigid than it seems. There is something ethereal about it, an inexplicable lightness. Although it looks like a world of lines and angles, we can also distinguish the “al- legory of forgetfulness” which Duchamp called “inframince” (non-thick geometry), or even a sudden transition from what’s familiar to what’s inhospitable. In a grid, space expands in all di- rections, and the piece is just a fragment which has been taken from something larger. This transgression takes us “beyond the frame”, and the surface of the picture dematerializes, while the material is dispersed “in a flickering or tacit movement”5. The grid, which has no hierarchy and no center, emphasizes its non-referential nature, and is clearly opposed to narration. This structure, which is impervious to time as well as coincidence, does not allow for language to enter the visual realm: the result is silence”6.
The grid is a representation of the pictorial surface. Repetition leads to a kind of glaze. Looking at Ruth Morán work you can see, on the one hand, the presence of minimalism as obsessive rationalism7, but you can also see that she is subtly breaking away from what´s mechanical, defending each line as something accidental, a trembling reality which comes from basic human emotions.What we are questioning in these modern times is not, as many have said, the images themselves, but the gestures: many have been lost, others have definitely become pathetic. Giorgio Agamben wrote: “Language itself is like an enormous memory lapse, like an incurable lack of words”8. “Gesture” is a pure medium, something which can be explained as the power of exhibition. Specifically, the gesture of painting is a highly significant movement,
5. Rosalind E. Krauss: “Retículas” in La originalidad de la Vanguardia y otros mitos modernos, Ed. Alianza, Madrid, 1996, p. 36.
6. Rosalind E. Krauss: “La originalidad de la vanguardia: una repetición posmoderna” in Arte después de la modernidad. Nuevos planteamientos en torno a la representación, Ed. Akal, Madrid, 2001, p. 18.
7. Cfr. Rosalind E. Krauss: “LeWitt en progresión” in La originalidad de la Vanguardia y otros mitos modernos, Ed. Alianza, Madrid, 1996, pp. 270-272.
8. Giorgio Agamben: “Teoría del gesto” in La modernidad como estética, Ed. Instituto de Estética y Teoría de las Artes, Madrid, 1993, p. 106.
Worringer felt that abstraction, at its core, pos- sesses the spirituality of ornament: this is what Ruth Moran´s work shows; but it goes further,
72 becoming a testimony of the senses. Regard- ing some of the fabulous pieces created by this artist, who gives herself over to a drawing’s ob- sessive pulse, I´m reminded that Agnes Martin described the moment of inspiration and im- pregnation of beauty as levity or even levitation: “Drawing horizontals, you see this great flatness and you have certain sensations, as if you were expanding on that surface” 4. Drawing is a way of obtaining knowledge, a process by which the eye encounters what the world has already “drawn”, which is like following the tracks of an established pattern. This framework, which
object's exact meaning; doing things in a random or auto- matic way; a preference for social outcasts or the fringes of society; a wish to celebrate what's "insignificant" or emba- rrassing in modern times; rejecting painting's conventional narrative; the false reproduction of an established pictorial genre; a parody of styles that were once powerful” (Timothy Clark as quoted by Brandon Taylor: Arte Hoy, Ed. Akal, Ma- drid, 2000, p. 116).
3. Cfr. Richard Wollheim: “Minimal Art” in Minimal Art, Sa- las Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastián, 1996, p. 31.
4. Agnes Martín: “La mente serena” in Agnes Martín, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1994, p. 23.
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