Archaeological

ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE PAST, CATHARTIC SUTURE

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The only doctrine of the eyes is to see.

Rafael Cadenas

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Contemplating Gabriela Martín Avendaño's work is to contemplate herself, the artist in her exposed being; it is to witness a selective record of the crucial events of her past, her formation as a person and as an artist. There is no sadder circumstance, if it can be called a circumstance, than the one expressed in Ricardo Reis's ode, the famous heteronym, bewildered by the discovery of his absence of being.

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Reis, contemplating himself split from vital experience, shouted his complaint into Pessoa's ear:

I don't know who I remember my past from,

I was another, nor do I know myself

Feeling with my soul

That other's who remembers feeling it.

From one day to the next we abandon ourselves.

Nothing certain connects us with ourselves,

We are who we are and it is

What we were seen from the inside.

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Reflecting on our past is to untie the knots of our mysteries with the hope of understanding ourselves and also, as the famous inscription at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi suggested, the universe and the gods. This cathartic action, praised by Aristotle in his Poetics for its purifying value for the self, has inexplicably and equivocally acquired, in common language, a fatally negative tone, a falsified synonym for paralysis or lethargy. Nothing could be further from the real meaning! Self-reflection, that cathartic introspection exercised by Gabriela Martín Avendaño, is a positive solipsism due to its marked gnoseological trait; because, in addition, she offers the artistic result as a gift for the eyes of those who contemplate her work, and she assumes us, those who appreciate it, in that vital universe, as we are portrayed in her painting, a guest brushstroke, a tiny invited lump; we are part of it.

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Apart from this offering to others, in order not to fall into vain and egotistical self-talk, the self-reflective artist possesses other strategies, among which Gabriela Martín selects two. On the one hand, the possible universalization of the expressed facts and feelings, as the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas, a compatriot of our artist, sang: I have witnessed their desperation, that tireless seeing themselves in what they gaze upon. Simultaneously concealing universality and privacy, her work thus acquires the dark clarity of an oxymoron.

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Another constant in Gabriela Martin's work is, in her own words, the application of an archaeological method. The recovery of personal past involves the intellectual effort of undermining, setting aside the dense load of the insubstantial until finding the prodigal treasure of oneself. It is a common action, which we all do from time to time, for as the aforementioned Cadenas says, "we are tireless day laborers. We dig, we dig, and the more we dig, the more our task grows. We dig searching for a hole."

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However, for Gabriela, her painting is properly the next action of the archaeologist: to handle the brush with neatness and caution until she manages to unearth each key moment, each instant of which she can say, like Goethe's Faust, "Stay, you are so beautiful!" And this set of frozen moments is what configures her painting. A painting in which she manages to fix what inevitably fades away. Suture for forgetfulness. Just as we long for the missing photograph of a loved one! Just as we evoke that beautiful moment of which there is only a weak record in the depths of our memory! Let us rejoice in seeing her in ourselves; in her painting!

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