Page 73 - Ruth Morán

flowing freely but in a somewhat enigmatic way, an arrow, a road, a direction, a path that has the same destination as the eye. Flusser pointed out that the gesture of painting is a moment of self-analysis, that is, of self-consciousness, in which having meaning and giving meaning become intertwined, along with the possibility of changing the world and being there for others: “before painting a picture, there is a gesture, and once the painting is finished that gesture is set and consolidated”9 . Ruth Morán´s repeated gestures represent journeys, fabrics, dissolving webs, and expanding skin, which according to Valery is “very profound”. This artist’s unique way of roaming strongly reminds us of what José Bergamín called “musaraña”, or “painting from the subconscious, painting while daydreaming”10.Regarding Ruth Morán´s work, Juan Fernández Lacomba said: “Her work was the result of dissociations and discoveries. Accumulated gestures and things building up, sometimes in a conscious manner but other times simply appearing on the blank canvas: a permanent spatial and material whiteness where she could carry out a variety of ideas an intentions”11 . Some people see abstract painting as level 0 or a vision of the
9. Vilém Flusser: Los gestos. Fenomenología y comunica- ción, Ed. Herder, Barcelona, 1994, p. 96.
10. “Don't search the dictionary for the "musaraña" I am re- ferring to now. It's not a living creature. It's not an animal, nor a spirit: yet it has something to do with both. It's like Balzac's chimera, the platonic idea, a strange invisible mons- ter which can’t be rendered figuratively, and which can't be defined poetically. "Musaraña" is something which the ar- tist him/herself isn't sure is real, but which exists in his/her thoughts and hopes, and believing in it feeds his/her theories. This is why we can't find "musarañas" in museums. [...] "Mu- saraña" is neither a muse nor a spiderweb in the artist's mind, it's what the artist thinks of without even realizing it, when he or she is not painting, but which later on serves as inspiration for a painting. The artist who keeps thinking about "musa- rañas" when painting, is not really painting, but twisting and tangling on the canvas, or board, or wall, while letting his or her thoughts wander. An artist's "musaraña" and the artist's work never coincide in time and space ” (José Bergamín: “Musaraña de la pintura (Aguja de navegar bultos, sombras y claridades)” in La importancia del demonio y otras cosas sin importancia, Ed. Júcar, Madrid, 1974).
11. Juan Fernández Lacomba: “Ruth Morán: de la expresión a la superficie” in Ruth Morán. Tejido Horizonte, Junta de Extremadura, Consejería de Cultura, Mérida, 2006.
end12; the zero would be like a syntactic plug, a place where designation and meaning come together; in other words, a place where things as opposite as excess and absence can combine, and melancholic loneliness mingles with the experience of contemplative intensity. Beyond a reductionist strategy, what concerns us is for people to realize that if we lose the time of sensation, everything will go adrift: the absolute gesture in Rothko’s work which some interpreted as emptiness was really a demand for abundance. Although historically, the monochrome square might seem like an empty void13, Ruth Morán’s work reveals, more than anything else, an unstoppable vitality, the testimony of someone who paints with great conviction. Kosuth pointed out that minimalist painting collapsed until it became what he calls the end of art history14. Nevertheless, Ruth Morán situation is less apocalyptic or conclusive, and it derives primarily towards pluralism, as a manifestation of a post-narrative15 aesthetic and epistemological period. Deleuze warned
12. “The whole idea of modernism, especially abstract art, which can be considered its emblem, would not have worked without an apocalyptic myth. [...] The absolute beginning, freeing oneself from tradition, “zero level” which even the first generation of abstract artists was searching for, could only have worked as a prophecy of the end” (Yves-Alain Boid: “Painting the Task of Mourning” in Endgame. Refe- rence and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1996). “Her work [Ruth Morán's] is often accompanied by a Baroque accumu- lation of lines interweaving in a sea of contradiction. This report of gestural motives surprisingly expresses a situation reminiscent of the spiritual vacuum of oriental art” (José Luis Molina González: “Redes del alma” in Ruth Morán. Te- jido Horizonte, Junta de Extremadura, Consejería de Cultura, Mérida, 2006).
13. “The monochrome square has a density of meaning: its emptiness is more like a metaphor than a formal truth – the emptiness after a flood, the emptiness of a blank page” (Ar- thur C. Danto: Después del fin del arte. El arte contempo- ráneo y el linde de la historia, Ed. Paidós, Barcelona, 1999, p. 166).
14. Cfr. Joseph Kosuth: “No exit” in Art after Philosophy and After. Collected Writings, 1966-1990, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991, pp. 228-229.
15. “Let's point out that if there are really no rules, it would be possible for artists to continue painting in any way they chose, and the way chosen would not necessarily have an- ything to do with history” (Arthur C. Danto: Después del fin del arte. El arte contemporáneo y el linde de la historia, Ed. Paidós, Barcelona, 1999, p. 181).
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