Page 77 - Ruth Morán

“As time goes by, and her work is slowly carried out, day by day, we begin to see artistic maturity among the globs of paint, weaving lines, and bright flashes of color. This is the result of long, arduous hours of work in the solitude of the studio, which reminds us that this is a very difficult process. Underneath this mesh of graphic subtlety and personal gestures there lies a solid, unfathomable personality. Nevertheless, a perceptive spectator can see through her inscrutability; and after examining the work closely, will begin to understand the complex intensity of these pieces which display an organized chaos”6 .
Thus it is almost a paradox: in order to create art you have to be fascinated by something that still does not exist, something yet to be defined. Anyone can see that this situation, this current state of affairs in which an artist consciously -or “ambitiously”, as Foster said7 - develops his/her work, is tremendously unsettling. Most people, and many artists themselves, are repulsed by this situation (after all, the 20th century was also Picasso’s century, paradigm of the mythical figure of the artist as genious). Hofmann summarized it this way (I have underlined some expressions): “The artistic problem, which nowadays is ap- proached with the same curiosity that used to be reserved to explorers, has multiple causes. First of all we are assuming that works of art are now questionable, that is, that their purpose and function is not clear nor can be easily recognized as aunthentic (...). The consequence of all this is that previ- ous definitions of art, as well as its sacred or decora- tive functions, have been relegated and are now considered less important. Thus we are now in an area which is free from all functionality, a kind of no-man’s land which is gradually being defined by aesthetic inter- pretation. This area is inhabited by conceptual con- cerns and recognized for what it really is: the place where artistic creation searches for its own definition and questions itself. Explained in a less exagger- ated way, it is the place where art becomes ques- tionable”. This is to say that art aims to produce
6. José Luis Molina González. Redes del alma. 2006
7. Hal Foster. The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century. 1996. It is quite striking to note the author’s predilection for this expression, “ambitious art”, which he uses in his masterpiece to refer to art which is conscious of being neo-avant garde, as explained in Danto’s thesis. See also: Arthur C. Danto. After the end of art. Contemporary and the Pale of History. 1997.
enthusiasm or restlessness, to question its own meaning or function, and - more than anything else- to represent a problem, a place where there is something going on.
Being an artist is obviously a way of being in the world (among others). This way of being is manifested like the artwork itself, within the con- text where it has been created, as a problem or paradox which can’t necessarily justify itself be- cause it’s not necessarily necessary, and it’s also continuously being redefined. To summarize, painting is exploring that which has not been done before, which does not mean there is any reason why this should be done at all: when Morán chooses to “do research..., an intricate and detailed study which does not lead to a single, spectacular piece like many artists have gotten us used to”8 , she doesn’t simply study, in a system- atic and critical way, certain basic elements of painting such as gesture or atmosphere. What she is basically doing is recording an action, or more precisely, the reiteration of a -somewhat absurd- action, and its development through time (this is clearly a reference to the senseless- ness of Penelope’s work: Ulysses’s wife undid her own knitting; she simply worked, and her only purpose was the reiteration of that action). Besides, one of the things that fascinates me most about Morán’s work is the way in which it always seems to be on the very edge of the abyss, as if it were about to fall into chaos, into anarchy, and become unstructured (which would make it ugly). In her work, Ruth Morán plays with the contradiction of a basic principle: “composition is the basis of art”9; nevertheless, true abstraction (Pollock, Tobey, Wols, Michaux...) has taught us that even in contradiction, or radical negation, there is bound to be meaning, if and when the same random movement is repeated enough (and this is exactly what Schrödinger demostrated in statistical physics10). There is meaning and pur- pose in the act of doing “something”, not because that purpose was established beforehand, but becauseitacquiresitafterwards. ThisisRuth Morán’s adventure: an elegant metaphor on art, the way we understand it today and the way we try to convey its meaning to others.
8. José Luis Molina González. Redes del alma. 2006
9. Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? 1991 10. Erwin Schrödinger. What is life? 1944
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