/ PRESENTATION
ALLONTANARSI DALLA LINEA GIALLA
Nuria Mora
by Fabiola Naldi
Step away from the yellow line
The title of this exhibition, “Step away from the yellow line”, declares itself almost in opposition to the research mode that represents Nuria’s work. In reality, Nuria has often crossed that yellow line, being aware of the ensuing risks, but remaining open to the possible challenges and conquests originated. The limit to overcome is certainly the physical one, of places, walls, both public and private spaces in which to search for, remove or add to what already exists in nature. It is in this first consideration that we find a central point of her work, what already exists can be manipulated, transformed, combined, and assembled in unexpected physical, mental, and spiritual form. From the first movements in more or less known locations, Nuria’s plots insert themselves with modules, elements, colours capable of adding to a first pre-existing surface a second one that alters the perception of the environment. Since 1999, Nuria has traveled her city, Madrid city centre and suburbs, in many ways: she has studied the architecture and city planning, understood the multiple historical sedimentations, insinuated herself in between surfaces to become anything but ornamental element on the metropolis’ own skin. Nuria has always moved within the not just tangible nature of experience, inside the reality of things in order to dare a transformation through her own intervention.
By changing both visual and structural elements through increasingly personal tones and formal combinations ever more identifiable as a style of her own, Nuria has been able to combine and compact different catalysts and connections into an idea of time and space both expanded and unrecognisable. And so appears what is often known as style: Nuria has developed and modulated unexpected forms, lines, and modules that insert themselves in most complex architectures, between least predictable pictorial surfaces, and ‘unlimited’ structures that we may call totem, not only for their aesthetic composition. Oscillating between abstract and concrete solutions in which phytomorphic elements of varied extraction appear as a unique code, a signature without signature, Nuria has chosen to combine her own experiences to arrive at establishing a possible new formal alphabet that is both two-dimensional and tridimensional. What now, here exhibited, appears to be fluid and organic (in both sculptures and canvases) is in fact part of an articulated design, embedded with journeys (a defining one for her on her red Vespa) in search of new visions or encounters of matter with ancestral materials such as ceramic. Almost like a dowser seeking for shapes and visual solutions, she feeds herself with crossings, casual encounters, collections, isolations and reconstructions of new identities, a minor detail that acts as a perfect visual pretext.
At the same time, Nuria having studied architecture, the encounter with the classicism acquires original features that feed the elaboration of forms in which the organic aspect becomes both symbolic and natural. The totems are the perfect example of this: four sculptural typologies in which the consistency of the object emerges, its essence, the ideal point where structural and linguistic layers converge.
Once again, the chromatic space feeds on emphasis verging on the spiritual (or perhaps, the psychomagic as reminiscent of the practice and surreal atmosphere of Alejandro Jodorowsky), for the treatment of the material that is manipulated, transformed, “baked” and brought to life by the forms created by the artist. If we bring up the classical etymology of the word form, everything about reading Nuria’s work appears to be clearer: from Latin forma, based on Greek morphé, the keyword is the visible aspect of a thing or, in Aristotelian sense, the essence of things that have matter and the end of their becoming. In this case, we stand before a visible representation of a thing, a place, an idea that changes precisely through its process of materialisation, whether that happens with ceramic (the totems) or sand (the paintings here exhibited). The sculptural/architectural typologies presented on this occasion are conducive of Nuria’s urge to reflect beyond the mere surface.
The Totems rise in the SpazioC21 courtyard as a comparative instrument and concurrently as a comparable category in architecture, with the iconology in painting, according to Project and Destiny, by Giulio Carlo Argan (ed. Il Saggiatore, Milan, 1965).
The formal result therefore obtained is then an object mode of consistency, its essence, the ideal point where structural and linguistic layers converge, the place where, drawing from a notion proposed by Vittorio Gregotti in The Territory of Architecture (ed. Feltrinelli, Milan, 1966), the abstract and concrete materials multiplicity is actualised in a unitary and recognisable expression.
From here, the visual solutions adopted by Nuria immediately appear clear, simple, identifiable as part of a symbolic alphabet of her own capable of translating reality precisely through these devices. Nuria reclaims that distant stereotype of the artist as dowser of organic and inorganic substances to inspire a renewed symbolic, functional, and aesthetic significance of the matter. All the new tension produced by the manipulation of the elements does is to nourish new harmonies and unexpected chromatic washes useful to create new sculptural, pictorial, and existential forms.
The classic conceptual divisions between form and content, form and matter, form and image, ever-present in classical philosophy, from Plato to Aristotle, from Immanuel Kant to the most recent psychology of the form have led us to think that the idea of form (whether architectural or pictorial) can no longer be ascribed to what defines it, but rather produces a semantic acceleration capable of inciting an added value that cannot be attributed to the content, the matter, the image.
During the 20th century, and particularly in the last decades, these apparent oppositions have produced original and stronger values.
Step away from the yellow line is to be seen from this perspective, as if Nuria had not only dared the gravitational force with the heights of the totems presented or the mixture of paint and sand.
Nuria has rejoined the very idea of matter and construction of a reality, not only hers, that projects itself onto the chromatic and gleaming faceting of the ceramics, or in the pictorial stratifications achieved. A further consideration can be made here in light of what has been said so far: if we return to the architectural platform understood as the generative foundations of not only visual pretexts, then we can argue that if in the past, and I’m referring to Postmodernism in particular, form declared itself as authentic entity, the same can now be recognised in the process that creates it. Once again, here we have reached another fundamental element of Nuria’s artistic process: we have moved to the phenomenology of its formation, constitution, ‘back to things themselves’ (as theorised by Edmund Husserl) through the materials, but especially the modalities of their mental design and material construction.
The constitutive elements of Nuria’s material and cultural plane are many, but what is essential for reading her work is precisely this continuous oscillation between conceptual plane (ideal and psychomagic) and material plane (given by materials such as ceramic and sand). Moreover, as per the famous slogan dear to the phenomenology of “get back to the phenomena”, we stand before a necessity, almost an urge, to take care of the intuitive processes with which we relate to and perceive the world. I write this because it is crystal clear to me how Nuria comes to reflect on what she feels she needs to do in her artistic research: her every intuition, and therefore her every knowing, relates to a transcendental dimension of the pure intuition that is visible in the forms of the totems and the colours she persistently pursues. Every time Nuria chooses a new field of research, or decides to challenge the laws of matter and of its possible transformations, her aptitude for looking beyond the things themselves, takes shape, past that line, yellow or otherwise, that represents her being an artist in this complex historical moment.