THE COLOR OF TIME

 

One could assume that the color in a painting comes from the immediate perception of the artist who made it. I understand that this is a descriptive and, why not, somewhat restrictive hypothesis. Perhaps color has another root.

I think this question in relation to the paintings of Bibi Anguio that will be exposed during the month of August in The Cat that Furries. Only the interest on her work and her talk generate this look on the color and the visualizations.

As far as colour is concerned, I take the liberty of considering that the question of the palette she uses is a little older than she assumes and that it is not only related to her university education and her everyday world. It may come from the confines of her memory, from those places of perception that are not linked to life experience but to the flow of other gazes from the sphere of the familiar that have built up in the past a way of seeing, of cutting out the world, of giving it colour. In oneself, innumerable experienced spaces coexist, perceived by others who preceded us and which arrive at the present as late waves, with greater or lesser strength, but with the predisposition of being part of us.

Colour should not be able to escape this becoming. I am referring to genealogy, to the terroir, where, precisely, the origin is raised again each time and in that pure action it is transferred, limited, amputated, accepted or hidden among many possible variants. Colour is part of that sensitive thread that has always included us and at the same time exceeds us. If we could trace back the atmospheres in which our ancestors lived and died, with all that that implies in terms of color and form, we would understand that our decisions have to do with a continuum of prescriptions and transgressions, a flow that at times approaches art and at others, crime, abulia or some other trickery that justifies staying.

Anguio's painting is linked by this path to the marine Italy of the maternal trunk and the Santiago del Estero of the paternal side. Sea and land. And without falling into the reiteration, I leave this look on his work to the route of the same one, in which the colors arrive at the tip of their brushes from other roots.

The immediate proof of this experience can be found in his Roofs of City Bell. Here, the operation of memory is carried out under more agile signs, since they correspond, to a certain extent, to the here and now. In this series, it is not a matter of giving an account of any roof but of what we might call the landmarks of a wider framework that includes many of us. And if the imprint of Santiago del Estero or of Italy implies an individual expression of color, when Anguio works on the roofs of the town where many of us were born, he immerses himself in a collective, multiplying palette that forms a kind of backbone of the childhood of so many others. And it is in this space of visualization where the impersonal of the past becomes a name. It could be said that each ceiling is associated with a name. It's worth quoting William Faulkner on this:

 

"His childhood was populated by names; his own body was like an empty room full of echoes of resounding defeated names; he was not a being, a person, he was a community" (in Absalom Absalom).

 

The name linked to a roof has much to do with the village experience, in which a facade expresses a recognizable and distinctive individuality, something that is lost in the approach of every citizen's network. We know that time operates over space in terms of transformation. Balzac already knew how to begin several of his novels by quoting and describing a facade of a house (of which there was not and would not be any more), as an indelible record of destruction. In relation to this approach, forty years later, the town of Anguio is different: the streets, the way of living, the way of linking with the gardens and many other things have changed. But some of those roofs are still standing and are obstinate in remaining associated with names, with all that this implies. Bibi Anguio, by cutting them out or fragmenting them, gives an account of this gap between roof and name. It seems to say that there is something that is not complete, that a part of the whole is on the way to extinction.

The roofs of the past, with the colour of the past of many, are installed in this series as if all the names were present in the artist and secretly, or half way, left to the perception of some, those who walked the streets of the town as parts of its totality. It invites us in the elision to be part of the work, to build it, to complete it with our voices, with our own configuration of color.

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Sometimes their City Bell Roofs hurt. I look among them for my own, the one that should bear my name, but it's gone. And I know well that it is not, because after having stood for more than seventy years someone decided that it was convenient to tear it down. And without a roof, there is no more name. That's where Bibi Anguio's work transcends us.

Nelson Mallach, 2014.