Page 76 - Ruth Morán

76
by all works of art”, Dickie declares3. In fact, for an object to be considered artistic - especially since Arthur Danto´s “experiment of indistin- guishable things”4 - the artistic quality of a piece does not even have to be something we can perceive with our senses; it’s more of an abstract concept, a kind of consensus: a convention.
As time goes by and Ruth Morán’s painting becomes more opulent and suggestive, a specific poetic quality begins to emerge from that solid formal and conceptual structure: Morán’s work becomes more delicate and harmonious, and one of the reasons this happens is because her basic argument has varied: this doodling - gesture, graphic design, or basic element of painting- becomes a web-motif, a symbolic object and element. Thus, from a formal point of view, these doodles make up a flat surface - and let’s not forget that all contemporary art, from Cezanne and Braque onwards, arose from the realization that painting is always flat, and also that nowadays when Fine Arts students begin their studies they become aware of the importance of this concept and are continuously referring to it. Morán´s flat surfaces are mature and sophisticated, they allow for space as well as playfulness, and the mechanisms of memory: “In this way, her paintings and drawings –despite being abstract and non-representational- are definitely drinking from the humid and plural liquid of this fountain”. Therefore, the surface of her compositions, the way the lines are placed, the force fields which are created, the faint but continuous presence of a horizon, the almost undetectable traces of the sea, a forest, the sky, or the night, seem like proof of a perfect crime, the subtle music of a star-lit sky or some underground life form..., all of this mental and visual evidence refers back to a personal (re) vision of the landscape” 5.
Nowadays, the definition of the word “artistic” itself -its mere existence- is derived from a group effort: “According to Plato’s theory of imita- tion, artwork exists within a double framework
3. George Dickie. Art Circle: A Theory of Art. 1997
4. Véanse: Arthur C. Danto. The Transfiguration of the Common- place: A Philosophy of Art (1981) and Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (1992)
5. Francisco Carpio. Una recóndita fuente. 2006
made up of the artist and the subject matter. According to the theory of expression (which has been around since the fifties), the work of art is in a unique relationship with the artist (...). Arthur Danto’s and Dickie’s institutional theory (developed in the sixties) tries to place art within a much more complex and varied framework (...). Works of art are considered “works of art” as a result of being within a framework or an institutional context. The institutional theory is in effect a contextual theory”.
Why, then, do we see this web (or weave)? And why does it become progressively tangled, like a ball of yarn? All we have to do is simply take a look at the pieces this artist has created in the last few years (considering the main part of her brief career to be the time between the splen- did exhibition Tejido horizonte (2006), and this first solo show at Ángeles Baños gallery) to see that what makes this work so marvellous is the way she reiterates: the motifs which are repeated obsessively in Ruth Morán’s work are countless. During my visit to her studio I was surprised to see that this artist has accumulated hundreds of notebooks and huge piles of papers full of these weaving lines, many of which will never have the chance to be transferred to a canvas or leave the studio. Dots, weaves, threads and doo- dles: the shape of the lines varies and evolves, but the attitude remains (it makes me think that if we mix-up the different paragraphs of a text, what was once a simple plot can become an im- penetrable labyrinth).
Thus, “art” is not just something that happens in the solitude of the studio, between the artist and the canvas; it is up to “the art world” (some would call it “the institution of art”) to deter- mine if something is art: “A work of art is an object created by someone to be presented to an audi- ence within the art world”; “The art world is made up of all the systems of the art world”, and even though this “world” is not just a “scene” –as many would have it- but an extensive group of people, institutions and even stories, those who do not possess some basic knowledge of art do not belong in this group (not just in a practical sense, which would allow access to practically everyone, but in a theoretical sense): “The audi- ence is a group of people who are prepared, to a certain extent, to understand the object that is being presented to them”.
engliSh textS