Between art and writing

When we had just come from seeing an exhibition entitled Signs and writing. Josep Suñol Collection at the Palau de Caldes d'Estrac Foundation, now we find in the same space Writing in the artistic story . Curious, if nothing else... if we don't take into account the relationship of the poet and playwright Palau i Fabre with the world of arts: friend of Picasso and Artaud and himself the son of a plastic artist.

If we look at it, writing is the name of "the thing" and its graphic representation. The visual arts are an optical grammar, both pronounceable and unpronounceable.

Aleph , the initial word of the Hebrew alphabet, comes from the Phoenician via Egyptian hieratic, and referred to an ox. Hence our A retains the inverted form of a bull's head with horns.

From the Egyptian hieroglyph to the Ceci no est pas... by Magritte, all through the phylacteries and other inscriptions intended for the reading public (a minority); from Quint Horaci Flac's ut pictura poesis , to the Perejaumes who bring marededeus out to dance... plastic arts and writing have converged and branched out many times.

In the current case, the curator Mercè Alsina presents several pieces and installations by seven female artists born between 1980 and 1991, almost all in a territory that some call "Catalan Countries", and which are characterized by an experimental drive: formally, each of them can embody very different proposals, although with a background consistent with their trajectory.

They are Marla Jacarilla (Alcoi, 1980), the writer and multimedia artist Alícia Kopf (Girona, 1982), Almudena Lobera (Madrid, 1984), the specialist in comparative literature, graphic designer, photographer and videographer Rita Puig Serra Costa (Barcelona, 1985), Laura Torres (Palma de Mallorca, 1990), the poet, storyteller and transdisciplinary artist Irene Solà (Malla, 1990) and the visual artist and PhD in translation Anna Dot (Vic, 1991).

The world that these -relatively- young artists have known is that of globalization, the internet and liquid society. They had not yet established their trajectories and the world was entering a systemic crisis that only deepened. They have also experienced a relative, shy, implementation or "normalization" of some postulates of feminism. Without being sought after, only women have participated in the construction of this curatorial process, including the designer.

Other keys to getting into the proposal are experimentation and the fragmentation of the creator's self.

According to Mercè Alsina, "the exhibition reflects on the incorporation of text in the generation of artistic works/projects with the aim of investigating whether the constructions that are generated in this process produce an intermediate space, which is not properly of the art or literature .

In the image: Anna Dot. Lovers who discover themselves II, 2020. Embroidery on cotton fabric, hung on an iron bar, 150x200 cm.