"Espiritu de la tierra"
Images of an essential mystique
"All
are men in eternity, rivers, mountains, cities, villages, all are
human, and when you enter into their bosoms, you walk in heavens and
earths; just as in your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth, and
all that you behold, though it appears without, it is within, in your
imagination of which this world of mortality is but a shadow"…
William Blake (1757-1827).
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"Oasis". 2011. 60"x 49".
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In the specific extent of the plastic and visual arts in Santo Domingo, the last decade of the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21th are delineated as “two feminine decades”. Of course, this dangerous and “precarious” estimation demands the critical and cleared glimpse on the expansive explosion of women, distinguishing personalities and practices that emerge, proliferate and transcend with new visions and/or revitalized aesthetic proposals.
Thus, the critics, curators and historians of the contemporary Dominican art that participate in the process of “passing the attendance list” to the Dominican women artists of the 90 and 2000 generations, could wake up on the brink of amazement by the creative overflow and the diversity of shades or “sensitive qualities” of each one of the concerned intimate stories.
Precisely, graduated from the School of Art of the Pedro Henriquez Ureña National University -UNPHU-, where she studied under the direct guidance of the teacher Antonio Prats Ventós (1925-1999), Natalia Conde Bidó, stands out from the Dominican creative women that emerge towards the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s. Sketcher, painter, sculptor, virtuous artist, of irreversible vocation and in the heat of development of a pictorial work carried out with sagacity, subtlety, honesty of profession and depth of feelings, Conde constitutes a case worthy to follow among the “late bloomers” or artists of “relatively delayed” blossoming in whose productions the momentous glows.
Although her plastic language assimilates and transmutes the representative thing, the Neo-figurative landscaping and the underlying surreality in nature, Natalia Conde paints from “inside”. She is not interested in what the eye captures nor in the external representation, as much as the perception or deciphering of the essential and enigmatic thing in life, in Cosmos and in existence; the mystery that trespasses the appearances of the real thing and the same intrinsic duality of human beings and things. For that reason, in a considerable part of her recent pictorial production, it is recognizable an emphatic predominance of the abstract-expressionist pictorial language. From this production results paintings like the ones entitled
“Avalanche” (2011), “When the Earth cools off” (2010), “Dance of the
Wind” (2011), “Earth Spirit” (2011), “Germination of the forms” (2011), “The birds came
first” (2011), “Cloudy Times” (2011), “Memory of the Fire” (2010),
“Earth and Time” (2010) and “Memory of Time” (2011), works in which
Natalia Conde transforms and materializes visions, emotions, feelings and personal experiences into aesthetic reactions full of attractions and fascinating mirages, presages and metaphorical insinuations.
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"Avalancha". Mixed medium on canvas.
2011. 40" x 67". |
In different recent works that comprise the works entitled “Earth and Time” that in this occasion is presenting the Main Gallery of the Centro Cultural Altos de Chavón Foundation, the artist persists on the urgency of a profound dialogue on the socio cultural transformations which result from the globalization process and the sensitive problem of the “ecocide”, two
key questions at the time of confronting the imminent situation of
fragility that touches the contemporary human condition.
“Earth and Time” is also the title of a composition of rigorous design in which Natalia Conde accedes to an instant of total integration of her plastic art language and at the same time that demonstrates her existential connection with the elements of the plastic art piece and the pictorial system. From a feverish and “contaminated” surface, explodes a simultaneity of beams and luminous surfaces trespassed by “silent” signs and shady stains. Materializing in an effective form the aesthetic strategy of “the power of the center”, Conde proceeds with audacity in the formal resolution of a pictorial space in whose central plane glows an atmosphere of gilded light, mystical, sensitive and even more attractive light.
“Earth Spirit” is a diptych of great format and impressive presence. It is not an image; it is an authentic “vision”, a profoundly lyric new aesthetic reality. The transparencies of the polychromy feel intimate and become hallucinating. The pictorial narrative has been subverted, it no longer fits in a surface of giddiness imagistic capacity in which enigma and evocation are installed. Nevertheless, this painting simply “talk to us” about the four vital elements: earth, fire, water and air…
The subject of time in the pictorial work of Natalia Conde has to do whereupon she herself is very clear at the time of assuming her condition of “eyewitness”. This preoccupation is not a confrontation of the historical human depredation, but admonitory devotion, dedicated and or/ spiritualized celebration her existence and her personal experience as “Memory of Time”. In addition, the works entitled “Germination of the forms” and “Memory of Fire”, paintings like “Dance of the Wind”, “The birds came first” and “Cloudy Times,” are able to send us towards
the strange contradictions of the relation between “Earth and Time”,
depredation and civilization; between nature, habitat, environment and human condition.
In these reactions, as in other recent works, Natalia Conde surrenders the pictorial surface to an effective translucence and sensual process so provocative that we feel the necessity to touch and to enjoy without limits its dense and ardent polychromy. Without a doubt, these works of Natalia Conde would have to be considered at the time of contextualizing the most resistant findings of the abstract or nonobjective Dominican painting of last the two decades.
Therefore, these Natalia Conde paintings let us behold an eminently ethical pictorial practice, whose concrete effects allow us to notice the vital relation between essence and existence, that is to say, between creative authenticity and introspective search. Mystical search, arduous and passionate search of a symbolic universe where the expression of the pulsations, of the intimate memory and the aspect of identity (factual space, corporeity, and cultural signs) is put under a subtle, progressive and admirable conceptual synthesis.
The ethics of Natalia Conde's pictorial exercise operate from the sincere and enthusiastic risk, from a creative adventure in which she plays all against nothing to obtain an aesthetic absolute that ciphers on a warm and beautiful way, the own integrity of her creative personality, the consummation of the inextinguishable myth: life and work, exaltation of a lucid and lively itinerary between “Earth and Time”, between memory, history, circumstances and eternity…
Amable López Meléndez
Member of AICA/Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art.
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. 08/2011.
