THE NATURAL DARKNESS OF THINGS
Mariano Navarro
Throughout her twenty year career, Laura Torrado (Madrid, 1967) has proven to be one of the Spanish artists with the most believable arguments and practice regarding two fundamental aspects of contemporary artistic creation: adeep inquiry into the concept of individual and collective identity, and a physical conformation of the pieces that make them visible, noticeable and actors in the eyes and mind of the viewer.
The basic elements for this retrospective exhibition have been formulating in the critiques and essays I have written about the artist over time, as well as in her contributions to group exhibits I have curated from the end of the 1990s up until the most recent publication, “Black Milk of Daybreak,” in April of last year in “Artecontexto,” magazine directed by my colleague here, Alicia Murría.[i]
Firstly, I will stress that the origin and principles that rule many of Laura Torrado’s compositions, and even her performance set designs, are basically sculptural, as much as the repeated use of photography could make you think otherwise.
This idea, in addition to its use of photography, also unfolds in drawing, installation, video (and with it, writing and dramatic representation, as well as performance and dance) and sound installation.
Since the beginning of her work, her main focus has been upon representation, at times personalized in and of itself (her self-portraits impress me), at times by way of other people, of attitudes and situations that question the established stereotypes of the feminine. At the same time, it has deciphered the different modalities of affection; it explores the uncertain territories of dread and fear, breathes sensuality into the impossibility of touch or feels in the dark recesses through which exude the collapse and decadence of an era and a culture that dissolve almost without having had time to contemplate their fall.
Equally important, although more hidden in its content, is her reflection on the causes, motives, process and consequences of being an artist, and while here the questions of gender are not entirely indifferent, and recognizing the system of social oppression practiced on women, the truth is that, as an artist, Laura Torrado observes and diagnoses similar symptoms in men who, like women, want to create a field of expression, intimately engaging in the pronounced discourse.
Her narrative system, crucial for penetrating her depths, is developed disjointedly, alternating or combining coherent verbal expression with gesticulation, the scream and the joy of the game, until composing broken dramas, which ooze nostalgia, pained amazement and silence.
In Salon de 1859, Charles Baudelaire sets forth the idea that only those who possess a soul capable of shining a magical and supernatural light on “the natural darkness of things”[ii]can fantasize without fear that chance confuses their images or about falling into confusion.
According to Roberto Calasso, interpreter of the French poet, “The natural darkness of things” is “the most common perception, that which glues the set together.”[iii]
I will let myself carry “the fantasy” of the chronicler and his instruments of knowledge, analogy and metaphor, to the terrain of art where his reflections were formed to deduce, perhaps not scandalously, that the magic and the supernatural that Baudelaire claimed in the mid 19thcentury, when the independent subjectivity of the artist was still forming, are the lucidity and conscience of himself, that carry the artist, in this case a female artist, to a contemporary imaginary figuration that shine light upon the darkness in herself, so as to give light to the spectral shadows that hide the viewer. It illuminates the natural darkness of things.
Ground floor. Texture.
The exhibit was conceived as an ascending journey from the ground floor of the Canal tower up to the interior of the water tank, with intermediate stops on the first, second and third floors, which are made up exclusively of photographs and videos, in no chronological order, but rather ordered by theme or motivation.
The itinerary can also be done in reverse, first going up to the third floor and continuing up to the water tank, to then descend, floor by floor, to the ground floor. The story that comes forth is different than the one I want to tell, but is not false or inexact in regard to the artist’s work.
The Ground Floor, divided into independent cubicles which all open to the center of the space, invite the presentation of all of the different types of work found in Laura Torrado’s projects. These range from her early works which, as I noted, are sustained in fundamentally sculptural concepts, to video, with drawing, installation, significant objects and the omnipresent photography in between.
In my idea, the different textures that her works acquire unfold, while showing the requirements that demand from the viewer’s perception, a certain panoramic of a permanent dialogue, whose text varies, nevertheless, with each person who initiates it. They are, in that sense, like a brushing together of sensibilities between different and unknown skins, visually exacerbated.
At the same time, the successive formal variants weave the plot that illuminates the narrative that they contain. From the magic formula of the translucent objects suspended in air from her first pieces, to the most recent vanitas, after those mutated into into porcelain flowers, with certain funerary weight and Elizabethan air, or into wallpaper in a place in which simulation and memory co-exist.
The “objects” portrayed in 1994 in places of industrial ruin make up an extensive, numerous series, and one of her first. They appear to be done with delicate paper or soft cloth, and share a certain volatile nature, at the same time physiological, as if they had certain compatible organic properties, which allowed them to grow or fly.
Undoubtedly, their sponge-like nature stands out, as if they were made of layers superimposed upon an easily adaptable yet solid material.
One is delicately supported upon the floor, barely touching it, like an anemone open on solid water or like the cradle of one unborn, at times glimpsed through a door, at times in a broader interior panorama which includes the windows, in which other fragments of paper or cloth, wave, like useless ripped window sheers.
The photograph included in the show includes two of these objects, circular, similar to gongs, hanging between the columns, from which a smaller one hangs, like a truncated cone. From all of them I await a sound that is never produced.
From the same period is the series “Cage,” a curtain or black mesh hanging from the ceiling to the floor in a room of the same building, which acts as a net or mesh of the surrounding space.
Just prior to these are the garlands of roses that form hanging spirals between the columns of an abandoned building, dated 1993. Since the first of her works, Laura Torrado aims for the “predilection for the ductility and malleability interwoven in things and personal relationships (that) in some way give information about all of her production.”[iv]
Much later she did The Insides(Still Life) and The Insides(Leg’s Still Life), both from 2005. The first piece is made up of some strange tubular bodies made of cloth and filled with what I suppose is wool or foam rubber that can be folded and twisted, taking on vaguely anatomical shapes. The second is those same simulated orthopedics, alongside the legs or the hips of a photographed model.[v]
In the second cubicle, going clockwise, La llorona (Lágrimas negras) (Crybaby (Black Tears)), a 2008 video, offers her fearless face, barely animated by the blink that alters it over long intervals and scored by tears, that involuntarily fall more than spill forth.
There is the reiterated presence of women’s pain, in most cases, like here, without prologue or reference. The only information that the viewer is given is the paused cry and the metallic buzzing of insects (perhaps busy bees around their Queen), which uncomfortably hums in the background.
The tragedy that we suspect surrounds the woman intermingles, guilty, with certain bitter comicality in the black trail that emerges from her eyes and stains her face. There is no laughter possible, like there is also not, as we will see[vi], in other clownish situations that her models enact.
As with other artists, there is also in Laura Torrado a special, intimate relationship with drawing, a proximity and immediacy that can rarely be reached with the lens and shot of the camera. Here the sensuality of the line and the stain is imminent and adjoining and close to the emergency of that which is alive and organic in the shapes. Her most recent drawings maintain a close relationship not with the pieces, but with the atmosphere and the story that she outlines in her latest photos, from the series Vida suspendida (Suspended Life), which we will look at now, and which we will return to on the second floor.
If the walls are covered in wallpaper that makes them bloom, as if it were a mask of memory, with the remembrance of a street in New York in Doméstico 00 (Domestic 00), 2000, the women in the photo El silencio y la noche (Silence and the Night), 2008, and in the video Good morning sweet heart, 2002, are masked, without forgetting their identity, behind the net of the stockings and behave as delinquent memories.
Among the recent photos is a prolific series, Vida suspendida (Suspended Life), 2010, whose characteristics strictly adhere to those that define the baroque Spanish vanitas, with their conjunction of declining objects, withered flowers and people lying on the ground in the sleep of death. They also possess a special skin, at times made of a predictable velvety touch and other times of only light, insatiably devoured by the shadows.
The center of the room is occupied by the projection of Le Jardin Féerique (The Enchanted Garden), a video made in 2009, which evokes the fragment of the same title of the suite and ballet by Maurice Ravel Ma mére l’oie(Mother Goose), with no other relationship to childhood than its evocation of fairies. On the contrary, and to my way of seeing, under the French musical notes there slides a story of sensuality and mystery, in which the wood fairies, some as pupae enclosed in their capsule, others prisoners behind a curtain of woman’s hair, as if it were a tapestry of trees drawn among shadows, contemplate the voluptuous caresses between two strangers who are similar, equal, lost in the touch of the tongue between the toes or in the tremendously aesthetic fold of the elbow. Finally, as on other occasions, a mute scream, thickly silent, closes the stage.
The peopled series Transhumances, 1994, is formally linked to the series of objects that we studied previously, as if it were a humanistic variation that sees itself impelled to include the person and, at the same time, most often, hide her appearance in order to give it a greater real presence.
Thus Laura wraps herself in a warm and passionate red fabric and acts out a particular liaison with the architecture of the place and its furniture. It begins as a post-minimalist proposal and culminates in a performance.
But it is also the first time that the artist becomes a model herself and announces or pronounces upon who she is and how she constructs herself and recognizes herself in the feminine universe.
They are images that have something germinal and supportive so that when she presents herself (nude), as in Transhumance I, she is protected and living inside, molding the red cloth into a vulva capable of sheltering herself and contributing to the dream.[vii]
In some way, the Ground Floor also covers the different sentimental texture expressed in Laura Torrado’s work, from immobile submission to the static of the disappearance, from pain to erotic sensuality. I would dare to even talk about the empathy of her objects with the perceiving subject, as if there existed certain contrition of the things in their dealings with humans.
First floor. Me and Myself.
The two pieces of Transhumanceslink the viewer to the works on the First Floor and have a common characteristic: the main character of all the photographs and videos is Laura Torrado herself. They were done in two different periods of time, the larger group between 1994 and 2000, and the videos a decade later in 2010.
The two oldest photos, To R. Hornand To L. Bourgeois. La poupée, pay homage to two other female artists: Rebecca Horn and Louise Bourgeois, women of different ages and times, but who coincided between the 1970s and 1980s in the new formulation of a gender culture.
So Laura Torrado becomes the nude model that dresses with aggressive and false animal horns (R. Horn), or with hanging bags with fringe or tassels, like the breasts of the Artemis of Ephesus or the tears that spilled from her chest (L. Bourgeois). She incorporates both into her material universe, to her baggage of discursive objects.
A piece from the same year, 1994, shows M. Sélavy, female alter ego to the male Duchamp, falsely dressed in epic wear, like the women from the series La femme déguisé, where with dresses made from the same soft material as the objects, the model, with a voluminous turban on her head and an enormous skirt, passes under intense chiaroscuros, through that abandoned building that we already know, as if dancing at an eighteenth century party, from which we don’t hear the music or the chatter of those attending.
If I point it out every time the turned-off noise, shout or voice appear, are cut short or silenced, it is because that verification of the suppression of noise imprints the image of its exteriorization and pronouncement, and is key to the argument of the artist, and is repeated, as much as or more than the voluntary use of the word and poetry.
The set of pieces gathered on this floor can be divided into two large groups, that which includes the “staging of the face” and those that do so in “the drama of the subject.”
The first, Autorretrato II (Self-portrait II), 1994, The Endless Story I, 1999, You, 2009, and the videos The Birthand Selfportrait as Artaud, 2010, unfailingly show the artist, in nearly all of them facing forward (although I believe it would not be wrong to include Youin this group of photographed faces, because although Laura has her back to us, she makes us look at ourselves in the face), adorned or dressed up with ornaments or unique, strange creations, signifiers of an analogy or metaphor which references her being as a person to further accentuate her being as a woman.[viii]
Autorretrato IIpresents her with the image of that which grows and proliferates, as if a thicket of branches stretched across the forehead and cheeks of a beautiful face. We can also imagine it attached to a piece of bloodless coral with anesthesia. In other works in the same series, the accessory and its sculptural background adopt the shape of suspended tears, of a grid-shaped lattice, or a spiral that surrounds the face. In all of them, Laura Torrado’s face is expressionless and distant.
For example, in the series Erased portrait, 1993, she appears with bared shoulders, eyes closed (another detail to follow in her pieces), and the drawing she has traced on the paper glued to the wall continues on her neck. Another shot shows her with a black shirt, also with her eyes closed, and her face covered by the same drawing, like an ornamental veil.
You, 2009, has taken on the starring role not only in this particular section, but also in this set of the exhibit. The pronoun “you” can be “you singular,” “you plural,” and “one.” As I said, this extensive convocation, printed on the nape of the artist’s neck invokes the response of the viewer, at the same time that I would say it whispers the guilt that the temptation infers in the look. The nape of the neck is both the spot for a kiss and the place to give someone a blow to the head. The gesture of putting her hair up and showing us her bare and tattooed neck is undeniably erotic.
Hair has a leading role in the two videos shown on this floor, in the same way that it was essential to the projection of Le Jardin Féeriqueon the Ground Floor.
In The Birth, 2010, birth is likened to the expulsion of a ball of black hairs from the artist’s mouth.
In “Ucello the Hair”, Artaud writes:“Uccello, my friend, my chimera, you lived with this great myth of hair. The shadow of this great lunar hand with which you record the monsters of your brain will never reach the vegetation of your ear, which turns and swarms to the left with every breeze from your heart. On the left the hair, Uccello, on the left dreams, on the left nails, on the left the heart. It is on the left that all the shadows open, the naves, like human orifices. With your head lying on this table where all humanity is capsized, what do you see other than the vast shadow of a hair?”[ix]If we consider that Artaud included these notes among the texts of From Art and Death, 1927, its significance takes us to a balance between invasion of life and the disappearance of the same in which the human avatar passes through.
There is a photo, from the very beginnings of Laura Torrado’s career, which anticipates the motive of the hair. I refer to Selfportrait, 1993, in which the very young artist appears with each eye covered by tassels of hair. We have seen this neutralization of her own gaze in other pieces of her work.
I would say that Mujer-escalera (Woman-Ladder), 1993, occupies an intermediate space between the stagings and the dramas. It is not exactly a self-portrait, as the artist cuts the shot at nose level, leaving her chin, mouth, lips and part of her right cheek and ear in sight, and the absolute stillness of her posture seems to distance it from the dramatic agitation, and yet the ladder drawn on her face and neck, the position of her hands and the apparent indolence of the model awake a mixture of worry and sympathy in the viewer, who involuntarily constructs the scene in which to inscribe it.
Escalera II (Ladder II), 1993, is a full drama scene, which has the space itself in which the acts happen: an indeterminate corner made of white paper, with the image of the ladder once again, now separate from the body of the artist and next to her, dressed completely in black, collapsed by its side, unmoving, as if she has fainted or is asleep.
Like the majority of her works, this is part of a numerous series. The viewer should bear in mind that although there are only one or two examples of the main series in the exhibit, those being the most expressive, what we see are fragments of a more complex construction, of which we will never have absolute truths, but will have sidetracks on which to travel the tale.
So Escalerapresents other options in which the artist, for example, hangs suspended in midair, as if suspended or in levitation or arrogantly rigid, hands pressed to her sides, or dressed differently, now with a white sheet, trying to reach it as if to climb it and flee from we don’t know what inexplicable or immediate threat or danger.
Certain characteristics from these works remained constant during a very long first period of time. For example, in a series not shown, El amante (The Lover), 1993, (which also has variations on the same theme that do not pertain strictly to it, which point to systematic methods of work), the only elements with which she tells the story are an undifferentiated background constructed of wrinkled white paper, her nude body that almost always remains under a sheet, and the movements and dance postures, more or less frenetic, with which she develops what must have been one of her first performances, then translated exclusively to photo shots.
In this context another series is especially relevant, this one very numerous and continuous from one image to the next. It is Serie B. El preludio(Series B, The Prelude),2000, which represents the artist climbing the stairs of a middle-class house as fast as she can, frightened, her eyes hunted and scared, her gestures worried, overwhelmed by a fear of we don’t know what or from where it comes, but which we can define, perhaps the most immediate being a situation of gender violence. But, and I think this is important, it is not the only possible situation, nor necessarily unilateral.
Among the “theaters of the subject” shown, La tormenta en los ojos (The Storm in the Eyes), 2000, is especially important. It is the only series shown in its entirety in the exhibit, which could also be included as a key piece in a more extended chapter on the topic “veiled or covered face” which runs throughout Laura Torrado’s career.
There are five final shots in which the artist, dressed with that black, neutral clothing seen in many other pieces, covers her face with a kind of soft shape, made by her using a piece of fabric and its folds in a series of uneasy gestures, with which she transmits to us the same physical sensations that an invisible face would produce.
In the same way, the diptych The Insidesmakes the same thing with a sheet of clay that covers her like an anonymous mask, with only a hole in the place that corresponds to the mouth, and from which not a sound escapes. A similar role has been played, at times and with the same name, by large tropical flowers that hide parts of the body or face; or violent movements of the head that sweep away the facial features, The Endless Story, 2000, or cosmetics, Mentiras de agua (Water Lies), 2000.
The way I see it, she traces a circle of existence for the female subject in western visual culture, masculinized, that drags real woman towards invisibility to substitute her with the stereotype of woman consolidated in each different and differentiated social time.
Second floor.Stories.
The works on the Second Floor all share the universe of narrative, be it from the proposal itself, either serious or comic, or introducing the verb of the writers or the staged reading of their texts in the visible.
It is well understood that the narrative in Laura Torrado has its own character and its own solidly drawn defining traits. Hers, for as much as I have attributed story qualities to them, are not exactly that. They rarely have a beginning and a final resolution, or an obvious plot.
Now, the artist will directly intervene in some of the pieces but not in all. In others the protagonists of the photos and videos are more or less improvised
models, actresses, actors.
They are either the final moment of a scene of vague origin and uncertain continuity (Si te quise (If I Loved You)and El presentimiento (The Premonition); or the development of a situation in which the artist has composed a script of acts for the different actors (Pequeñas historias bucólicas / Small Pastoral Stories); or a reinterpretation that is pleasant and distanced or disturbingly immersed in the words of the poets (Conversaciones/ Conversationsand Fuga de muerte / Death Fugue); when it is not the composition of images as symbols that inscribe the text and the textual on the skin of the representation itself (Vida suspendida).
Firstly, works from 1995 that combine the domestic and the role of the women in this ideological area are grouped, accentuating the stereotypes and common places of the feminine. Added to this is a way of seeing that immediately brings to mind painting and its paraphrase.
The reproduction of Modigliani’s painting, in the background of the two versions shown of El presentimiento, is a clear and direct reference to the painter’s famous nudes (even in version three, the artist, who also seems to play with the anachronism of her dress, seems as fascinated as interested in the model’s pubis, as in the (for us) odorless perfume that exudes from the perfumer she carries in her hand[x]), while in Si te quise V, Torrado portrays herself half way between Ingres’ style and the nineteenth century odalisques, and calendar girls, partially stretched out on a red cloth, in feline yet modest underwear[xi], with the pilgrim-like accompaniment of some kitchen utensils, pots, slotted spoon and spatula in front of her, like the classic still lifes, and a scandalous green garbage can behind her.
In the same series she portrays herself in the same kitchen, in pants and half nude, covering her breasts with a slotted spoon and a ladle, and stepping on a pair of open scissors with her right foot, in an anomalous mix of classic – I don’t know why I see Caravaggio in it – and modern iconography, with a certain bit of surrealism.[xii]
There is another, in the same domestic space, dressed in a man’s suit, barefoot and wearing a saucepan as a hat, with different scissors at her feet, which make me, as I felt before, think about certain portraits of ecclesiastics and gentry and in Max Ernst’s drawings and paintings.[xiii]
However, the artist tells me that the direct reference is to Frida Khalo’s painting Mira que si te quise, fue por el pelo, ahora que estas pelona ya no te quiero (Look if I loved you it was for your hair, and now that you don’t have your hair I don’t love you anymore), in which the Mexican painter creates a self-portrait dressed as a man, with the scissors still in hand, and her heavy long hair cut and fallen on the floor and around her.[xiv]
On the other hand, throughout her career, the artist has been inscribing on her work a constellation of names that frame a conceptual and sentimental universe: the previously mentioned Rebecca Horn, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, Caravaggio and Frida Khalo herself. I would add Hans Baldung Grien and Max Ernst, and the writers Antonin Artaud, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Silvia Plath and Paul Celan.
Perhaps they coincide in the questioning of the social and gender roles that they each adopted in each specific historical moment, while they represent ways of resistance and adoption of identities that become permanent and pertinent in contemporary society.
Along with the three pieces from 1995 we have already discussed, there is the video Conversaciones,and the photos from Vida suspendida, both from 2010-2011, which in some way confront her proposals with other videos, Pequeñas historias bucólicas, 2005-2007, – as well as various photos from the series of the same name – and Fuga de muerte, 2009.
Several characters from children’s stories and animated films appear in Pequeñas historias bucólicas, like the queen-witch from Snow White, Bugs Bunny and animals from fables. These include the sheep and the pig, which are interpreted by women, on rare occasions semi-nude, and other times by little girls, which make up fixed situations that I consider to be authentic “moral stories,” in which the notion of the educational and the formative as well as elements of confrontation and competency symbolically participate.
There are also cases where one of the characters, especially the queen-witch, is moved to other situations, or if not the character, then her mask and, as such, her significance. Thus she participates as one of the main voices in Conversaciones.
The photo series has its complement or paraphrase in the video of the same title, Pequeñas historias bucólicas, made between 2005 and 2007, in which three actresses, one of them with her face partially covered by a mask, play a strident and convulsive short sonata on children’s instruments (a plastic pan flute) or improvised instruments (a bicycle pump attached to a balloon). It is as annoying to see as it is to hear, obsessive, emitting a sad melancholy, as if to show that it is impossible for adults to share the happy confidence of childhood joys and that the paradisiacal place never really existed.[xv]
There is also underlying the mark of the frustration of those unfulfilled desires, the balloon that will never be inflated, and the senselessness of many adulthood actions and obsessions.
The concatenation between the words of the three suicide poets fascinates me.
The first from Paul Celan, German poet of Russian origin, in his homonymous poem to the video “Death Fugue,” included in his first book, Poppy and Memory, published in 1952 (the year I was born), and considered the best post-war German poem and for many, equivalent in Celan’s work to Guernicain Pablo Picasso’s.
Laura Torrado conceived it as a reading in two times, before and after a children’s game that releases the tension of the speech; a reading produced by the mouth of the reader while she executes a monotonous dance step and another two actresses and an actor participate in both the dance and a game of blind man’s bluff. It thus sets some of the characters from the Celan text: his relationship with music and the compliance with the explicit orders to “touch and dance,” the ties to memory and forgetting, and the permanent imprint of death. At the same time it opens certain questions about the creative act and its ultimate substance, and fixes a certain oscillating artistic position between the metaphysical impossibility and the pressing need of history. From this the closing of the video is, now written, other words by Paul Celan, but these about himself: “There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German… perhaps I am one of the last people who should continue living in order to carry out the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe. That obligation I have felt as a poet, as a poet that could not stop writing despite being Jewish and writing in German…”[xvi]
Issues on an ambiguity similar to what every artist must confront in relation to her instruments and means and her position in the social discourse, are constant reasons for reflection on Laura Torrado’s work.
The second, Conversaciones, her longest, simulates a talk in two successive times, in which the American Sylvia Plath and Englishwoman Virginia Woolf speak. They seem to make up two ways of being a woman and an author as similar as they are opposite. Woolf in some way embodies the hopeful idea of having a room of her own, Plath perhaps wanted to fulfill the dream of behaving like the charmingly perfect woman, even when faced with the brutal and cruel behavior of men. Both came to tragic and, if you will allow me the expression, aesthetically enduring ends. Sylvia Plath, at the age of thirty, left a glass of milk on each of her children’s nightstands and, as you can see in the video, “closed herself in the kitchen, stuffed all of the cracks with towels, then stuck her head in the oven and turned on the gas. When they found her she was still warm!” Virginia Woolf, almost twice as old as Plath, fifty-nine, filled her coat pockets with rocks and walked into the Ouse River, next to her house, where she drowned. Both were ultimately recognized by women as distinct embodiments of feminism. Ironically, both, according to Wikipedia, would currently be diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder.
The image in the video mainly focuses on the mask of the queen-witch from Snow White, reconstructed from ruin when it pretends to be Plath and worn with shameless decorum when it simulates being Woolf. There is a certain air of animated still life, plucking wilted leaves and flowers and tufts of hair, and there swings a strange transparent sack made of grapes in a stocking that swings before your eyes, reminiscent of sculptural objects from years ago. When they do not shout or whisper at each other, they wheeze a tired and intermittent breath.
From the agitated and anxious dialogue there echoes again and again a wish from Sylvia Plath: “I don’t want any more poems.”
Laura Torrado has configured, especially in these two videos, a dramatic representational model made of fragments of published texts, fragments of her own texts, symbolic functional utensils and apparently senseless actions which are closely tied to the author or authoress’ desire.
They face the dark shots of Vida suspendidain which some of the utensils and objects that appeared earlier in her work, such as the cloths and the flowers, but also the clumps of hair, acquire a worn yet un-aged skin, deteriorated by the presumed passage of time. Even the text adheres to the body of the woman like the prayer of a litany of possible and marked actions: “I redeem, I reappear, I retain, I renounce, I gather, I deliver, I join…”
Third floor. Representations.
If there are two series in Laura Torrado’s work that, in my opinion, require the full showing of their components, they would be El dormitorio (The Bedroom)and Hammam, both from 1995. It was not possible, but the viewer should keep in mind the complete sequences in order to calibrate their true reach.
They are for me the artist’s most intense works and make up a woven counterpoint between two universes of existence of women. I have mentally co-existed with these works and have written about them several times in the twenty years since their creation, which has provoked different impressions and generated different interpretations, although they coincide in their general ideas.[xvii]
In El dormitorio, the staging also clarifies the circle of affection that includes, to call it something, the lineage of the loving maternal feeling: we know that they are grandmother and granddaughter, but although we don’t know it, we deduce that there is a tie that unites those women separated by decades of years, that they share the intimacy of the bedroom, that the photographic sequence gathers vital “documents,” such as the crucifix above the bed, the proximity of the Trimline telephone (which places us in a specific moment in time), and the cosmetics and perfumes on the dresser, that show that the old woman takes care of her appearance. Both also share the same type of dress, comfortable clothes that are between those you wear around the house and those that are out of style, and from the different postures one or the other adopt, the viewer composes or imagines not a story, text is missing for that, but a representation or painting of something. The grandmother with her back to us, seated on the edge of the bed while the granddaughter, seated in profile on the other side fixes her hair and appears indifferent. Or perhaps it is the other way around, she is upset by the anxious gesture of the old woman lifting her hand to her neck. The woman stays like that, when the young girl has turned away and faces the viewer, although still at her back. In another, the old woman seems to be talking about some event, or talking about something that happened that involves her and she quickly moves her arm in a gesture of anger or pain, while the young girl, whose gesture and face are invisible, seems to be listening attentively. The most direct shows both of them, the old woman standing and the young girl sitting on the edge of the bed, both of them facing the viewer with a certain uncomfortable rictus, as the viewer has interrupted a private moment with his or her, on the other hand, awaited intrusion.
For Laura, it was her grandmother who kept the family memory and memories of terrible things that happened in this country while bringing her knowledge to the present. A voice that eluded general silence, that was full of significance. Reviewing old photos of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, the composition of a frieze of the own and secret avatars. Confidences.
Hammam, with its exotic title contradicted by the villainy of the place where different and similar scenes take place (a vulgar fish market, in which we distinguish some instruments or tools of the trade, scales and pitchers, boxes and knives and also a vulgar calendar) anesthetizes the erotic of the nudity of the half dozen young women shown as much for the turpitude of the surroundings as, and this is more important, for the static, solitary and independent attitude of the women, that do not even glance at each other, nor do they touch or brush against each other, except in the crudest of situations, when they appear stretched out on their sides on the counter, one against the other, like fish lined up for sale or cattle or other dead animals, Hammam V.
In La Folie Baudelaire, Roberto Calasso makes an assessment about Dégas that jumped out at me for its close connection with Laura Torrado. The Italian writer confirms that “What clashed with Dégas was not the ungainly appearance of the female body, but something much more poignant: the complete abandonment of the canonical gestures”.[xviii]
Further on, he declares: “He was tenaciously looking for those intermediategestures between the canonical, the gestures that do not have a meaning and are only functional, often unconscious, often not even clearly perceived by whoever is doing them”.[xix]
If we think about Laura Torrado’s representation of the feminine, and perhaps a bit on their masculine figurations (although these always seem farther away to me), we see that in the poses and gestures of her protagonists and in the relationships and ties that are established among them,there is also this vagueness between two moments of unknown but, doubtless, differentmeaning.
The third floor is completed with pieces from three different series, chosen from among the many that represent groups of men, or groups of women, in attitudes and situations that frame both a social and personal condition, or fragment the class stratifications or points them out accentuating common defining traits from a specific position.
Although Sherezades’title might make you think that its appropriate place would be the children’s stories, to me this series from 2008 plays with certain differentiating stereotypes between masculine and feminine. An example is the image of two of the three women who appear in the series, wearing silly mustaches, staring questioningly ahead (just like in the rest of the photos from the series). Perhaps, in the opposite sense, when feminine complicities and affects are represented, as in Sherezades. El abrazo.
Prior to Sherezades,there are Las esquinas del espejo (The Corners of the Mirror), 2000; Jardín de hielo (Ice Garden), 2000; Filles modernes, 2001; El relevo (The Substitute), 2006, her most vibrant approach to the idea of the immigrant, the other. In this case, the others, a beautiful, desolate and expectant trio of black women: Las mil y una noches (A Thousand and One Nights), 2003; La rosa de los vientos (The Rose of the Winds)and La rosa de papel (Paper Rose), 2007, the last with two artworks from the exhibit that I will speak about next. Also from 2007 is Masculinos, a quartet of women dressed as executives from the same company, with that corporate trait of similar red ties, wearing the stern gesture of sharks or saddened by economic worries.
In the series La rosa de papelshe submits the images to a fragmentation that only lets you see part of the body of the women in the piece. Two of them are on their knees imploring for we don’t know what, and the third is seated by their side, here a slender woman seated with her legs crossed and an easy way about her, and the other two standing by her side. They are faceless and yes, as I indicated,[xx]have a sculptural composition, with something of a Greek frieze of another type of classic antiquity, which takes us back to the origins and beginnings of the artist, and shows how much her ways have changed.
Finally, two pieces from the photo series, Hammam2013, 2013 not yet completed, and a video The Members, 2004. These are not her only works featuring men; they are also in series Masculino y poder (Masculine and Power), 2003, and the videos L’eté indien, from 2004, and Fuga de muerte, 2009, which we discussed earlier. They confront the ambiguous conventions or the explosiveness of the gesture with those of the viewer, regardless of gender.
The video and even more, Masculino y poder, not exhibited, exemplify her vision of the internal construction of the work world at the top levels of businesses, another convention of gender stereotypes and, in that sense, I recommend the careful reading of the artist’s text in the art grant catalog Generación 2003, where they were shown, because between the lines she makes a commentary that could be applied maybe not to all but to at least a very large part of her work, both in quality and quantity: if in this video in particular women do not participate “it is not a question of gender, but of the values of each gender.”[xxi]
The actors in Hammam2013 are, in a sense, the conceptual partners of the actresses in Hammanfrom 1995 and, at the same time, their opposites. If these exude an isolated sensuality or suffered from their consideration as mere carnal objects, those adopted poses and gestures that move away from masculine exhibitionism, even from the macho world, to their palpable and perceptible feminine content.
I can not resist comparing them to the Picasso models from the Avignon brothel, if we deprive them of moral provocation and only focus on their iconic potential, figures that define the way to confront painting there, figures that outline the way to confront the gender laws in Laura Torrado’s photographs.
Up above, in the water tank, someone is breathing.
[i]Navarro, Mariano. “Laura Torrado”, El Cultural, November 14, 1999. http://www.elcultural.es/version_papel/ARTE/18185/Laura_Torrado/; “Carcoma y pátina. Vanidad de vanidades”, in Vanitas. Canto líquido, Encuentros Collection, Casa de Velázquez, Madrid, 2000, p. 6-14; Navarro, Mariano. “Laura Torrado. Leche negra del alba”. Artecontexto magazine, nº 32, April 2011, p. 63-73. Exhibits and texts from the catalogs: Identidades críticas. Arte español de los noventa, Sala Puertanueva, Córdoba and Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid; Ficciones y realidades. Arte español de los 2000 en la Colección de Arte Contemporáneo Museo Patio Herreriano, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, 2011.
[ii]Baudelaire, Charles. “Salon de 1859”, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. II, 1976, p. 624.
[iii]Calasso, Roberto. La Folie Baudelaire, Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, 2011, p. 247.
[iii]Ibid, p. 21.
[iv]Navarro, Mariano. “Laura Torrado. Leche negra del alba”. Op. cit, p. 63.
[vi]Thus, for instance, the apparently laughable acting of the women in Pequeñas historias bucólicas, 2005-2007.
[vii]The online catalog of Artium has the following information from Transhumance II: “On a somber stage that could be an airport hangar, Laura Torrado (Madrid, 1967) constructs a very careful photograph, of balanced composition, where two parallel elements stand out with: almost a sculptural, corporeal nature and powerful vertical position. A chipped column in the forefront and a slender body, presumably of the artist herself, wrapped in a red cloth like a tunic, which falls elegantly from her head and extends, almost brushing the floor, up until the mentioned column, both elements remaining connected in an unusual dialogue. The austere staging, the dismal lighting and strong presence of the column and the red body recreate a silent, intimate and disconcerting atmosphere, which characterizes all of Laura Torrado’s work. An environment full of oneiric suggestions, a surreal moment that seems to hold some mystery and that, nevertheless, can contain multiple meanings. Is this an anonymous body that hides its identity under a mantle? Is it a sculpture that aspires to be a column? Does it matter? The title of the work, Transhumance II, opens the possibilities of reading and can evoke an endless list of stories.” www.artium.org//Colección/Catálogoonline/tabid/104/language/es-ES/Default.aspx
[viii]Alicia Murría offers a reading on this aspect of her work that I find very revealing. “Using her own image, Laura Torrado creates disturbing self portraits where she herself constitutes the material of the work to embody and give physicality to a complex introspective discourse that alludes to feelings, sensations, perceptions and moods. Her works deeply investigates the being, in individuality, but at the same time her images speak of universal aspects that we can share and in which we can identify.” Also that “Her portraits and self portraits, that are done in series, have something of the theatrical, in the sense of construction and staging, and it is almost secondary that she is a subject, because it is more important what happens in each image that the body itself or the face that appears there.” Murría, Alicia. “Laura Torrado: lugares de intimidad”, cat. Laura Torrado, Actes Sud/Altadis, 2000.
[ix]www.lamaquinadeltiempo.com/Artaud/artaud07.htm(Spanish). From Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings. University of California Press, Berkley, 1976, p. 135 (English)
[x]El presentimiento IIshows Laura Torrado facing forward, reading a page she might have written herself on the typewriter from version I.
[xi]The same leopard-print nightgown she wears in Si te quise I, where she appears simply standing in the kitchen with a cold, fixed stare upon who is looking at her.
[xiv]Written by the hand of Poniatowska, Frida it says: «The hands you are took up the scissors and cut my hair, they scattered the long hairs on the floor, they dressed me as a man, they buttoned the buttons of my trousers and the wrote the song: If I loved you it was for your hair, now that you are bald I don’t love you anymore.” I painted everything, my lips, my blood-red nails, my eyelids, my ears, my eyelashes, my stays, my nudity, my blood, the blood that left my body and they put back in me, the Judas who surround me, the one who cares for my sleep at night, the Judas who inhabits me and who I don’t let betray me. This that you see never wanted to be like the rest; ever since I was a girl I tried to stand out so they would put me on an altar. I always knew in my body there was more life than death. I’ve known since I was a little girl, but then I didn’t care because I learned to combat loneliness. They isolate a sick person. You meet your friends in jail and in bed.”
[xv]Navarro, Mariano. Op. cit, p. 66.
[xvi]The beautiful “black milk” of daybreak anaphora gave me the title for my last until now critical essay on Laura Torrado’s work. Navarro, Mariano. Op. cit.
[xvii]See Navarro, Mariano. “Laura Torrado”, El Cultural. Op. cit.; and also Navarro, Mariano. “Laura Torrado. Leche negra del alba”. Op. cit.
[xviii]Calasso, Roberto. Op. cit., p. 247.
[xx]Navarro, Mariano. Op. cit. p. 66.
[xxi]Generación 2003. Becas de arte. Obra Social Cajamadrid, Madrid, 2004, p. 79.
THE NATURAL DARKNESS OF THINGS
Mariano Navarro
Throughout her twenty year career, Laura Torrado (Madrid, 1967) has proven to be one of the Spanish artists with the most believable arguments and practice regarding two fundamental aspects of contemporary artistic creation: adeep inquiry into the concept of individual and collective identity, and a physical conformation of the pieces that make them visible, noticeable and actors in the eyes and mind of the viewer.
The basic elements for this retrospective exhibition have been formulating in the critiques and essays I have written about the artist over time, as well as in her contributions to group exhibits I have curated from the end of the 1990s up until the most recent publication, “Black Milk of Daybreak,” in April of last year in “Artecontexto,” magazine directed by my colleague here, Alicia Murría.[i]
Firstly, I will stress that the origin and principles that rule many of Laura Torrado’s compositions, and even her performance set designs, are basically sculptural, as much as the repeated use of photography could make you think otherwise.
This idea, in addition to its use of photography, also unfolds in drawing, installation, video (and with it, writing and dramatic representation, as well as performance and dance) and sound installation.
Since the beginning of her work, her main focus has been upon representation, at times personalized in and of itself (her self-portraits impress me), at times by way of other people, of attitudes and situations that question the established stereotypes of the feminine. At the same time, it has deciphered the different modalities of affection; it explores the uncertain territories of dread and fear, breathes sensuality into the impossibility of touch or feels in the dark recesses through which exude the collapse and decadence of an era and a culture that dissolve almost without having had time to contemplate their fall.
Equally important, although more hidden in its content, is her reflection on the causes, motives, process and consequences of being an artist, and while here the questions of gender are not entirely indifferent, and recognizing the system of social oppression practiced on women, the truth is that, as an artist, Laura Torrado observes and diagnoses similar symptoms in men who, like women, want to create a field of expression, intimately engaging in the pronounced discourse.
Her narrative system, crucial for penetrating her depths, is developed disjointedly, alternating or combining coherent verbal expression with gesticulation, the scream and the joy of the game, until composing broken dramas, which ooze nostalgia, pained amazement and silence.
In Salon de 1859, Charles Baudelaire sets forth the idea that only those who possess a soul capable of shining a magical and supernatural light on “the natural darkness of things”[ii]can fantasize without fear that chance confuses their images or about falling into confusion.
According to Roberto Calasso, interpreter of the French poet, “The natural darkness of things” is “the most common perception, that which glues the set together.”[iii]
I will let myself carry “the fantasy” of the chronicler and his instruments of knowledge, analogy and metaphor, to the terrain of art where his reflections were formed to deduce, perhaps not scandalously, that the magic and the supernatural that Baudelaire claimed in the mid 19thcentury, when the independent subjectivity of the artist was still forming, are the lucidity and conscience of himself, that carry the artist, in this case a female artist, to a contemporary imaginary figuration that shine light upon the darkness in herself, so as to give light to the spectral shadows that hide the viewer. It illuminates the natural darkness of things.
Ground floor. Texture.
The exhibit was conceived as an ascending journey from the ground floor of the Canal tower up to the interior of the water tank, with intermediate stops on the first, second and third floors, which are made up exclusively of photographs and videos, in no chronological order, but rather ordered by theme or motivation.
The itinerary can also be done in reverse, first going up to the third floor and continuing up to the water tank, to then descend, floor by floor, to the ground floor. The story that comes forth is different than the one I want to tell, but is not false or inexact in regard to the artist’s work.
The Ground Floor, divided into independent cubicles which all open to the center of the space, invite the presentation of all of the different types of work found in Laura Torrado’s projects. These range from her early works which, as I noted, are sustained in fundamentally sculptural concepts, to video, with drawing, installation, significant objects and the omnipresent photography in between.
In my idea, the different textures that her works acquire unfold, while showing the requirements that demand from the viewer’s perception, a certain panoramic of a permanent dialogue, whose text varies, nevertheless, with each person who initiates it. They are, in that sense, like a brushing together of sensibilities between different and unknown skins, visually exacerbated.
At the same time, the successive formal variants weave the plot that illuminates the narrative that they contain. From the magic formula of the translucent objects suspended in air from her first pieces, to the most recent vanitas, after those mutated into into porcelain flowers, with certain funerary weight and Elizabethan air, or into wallpaper in a place in which simulation and memory co-exist.
The “objects” portrayed in 1994 in places of industrial ruin make up an extensive, numerous series, and one of her first. They appear to be done with delicate paper or soft cloth, and share a certain volatile nature, at the same time physiological, as if they had certain compatible organic properties, which allowed them to grow or fly.
Undoubtedly, their sponge-like nature stands out, as if they were made of layers superimposed upon an easily adaptable yet solid material.
One is delicately supported upon the floor, barely touching it, like an anemone open on solid water or like the cradle of one unborn, at times glimpsed through a door, at times in a broader interior panorama which includes the windows, in which other fragments of paper or cloth, wave, like useless ripped window sheers.
The photograph included in the show includes two of these objects, circular, similar to gongs, hanging between the columns, from which a smaller one hangs, like a truncated cone. From all of them I await a sound that is never produced.
From the same period is the series “Cage,” a curtain or black mesh hanging from the ceiling to the floor in a room of the same building, which acts as a net or mesh of the surrounding space.
Just prior to these are the garlands of roses that form hanging spirals between the columns of an abandoned building, dated 1993. Since the first of her works, Laura Torrado aims for the “predilection for the ductility and malleability interwoven in things and personal relationships (that) in some way give information about all of her production.”[iv]
Much later she did The Insides(Still Life) and The Insides(Leg’s Still Life), both from 2005. The first piece is made up of some strange tubular bodies made of cloth and filled with what I suppose is wool or foam rubber that can be folded and twisted, taking on vaguely anatomical shapes. The second is those same simulated orthopedics, alongside the legs or the hips of a photographed model.[v]
In the second cubicle, going clockwise, La llorona (Lágrimas negras) (Crybaby (Black Tears)), a 2008 video, offers her fearless face, barely animated by the blink that alters it over long intervals and scored by tears, that involuntarily fall more than spill forth.
There is the reiterated presence of women’s pain, in most cases, like here, without prologue or reference. The only information that the viewer is given is the paused cry and the metallic buzzing of insects (perhaps busy bees around their Queen), which uncomfortably hums in the background.
The tragedy that we suspect surrounds the woman intermingles, guilty, with certain bitter comicality in the black trail that emerges from her eyes and stains her face. There is no laughter possible, like there is also not, as we will see[vi], in other clownish situations that her models enact.
As with other artists, there is also in Laura Torrado a special, intimate relationship with drawing, a proximity and immediacy that can rarely be reached with the lens and shot of the camera. Here the sensuality of the line and the stain is imminent and adjoining and close to the emergency of that which is alive and organic in the shapes. Her most recent drawings maintain a close relationship not with the pieces, but with the atmosphere and the story that she outlines in her latest photos, from the series Vida suspendida (Suspended Life), which we will look at now, and which we will return to on the second floor.
If the walls are covered in wallpaper that makes them bloom, as if it were a mask of memory, with the remembrance of a street in New York in Doméstico 00 (Domestic 00), 2000, the women in the photo El silencio y la noche (Silence and the Night), 2008, and in the video Good morning sweet heart, 2002, are masked, without forgetting their identity, behind the net of the stockings and behave as delinquent memories.
Among the recent photos is a prolific series, Vida suspendida (Suspended Life), 2010, whose characteristics strictly adhere to those that define the baroque Spanish vanitas, with their conjunction of declining objects, withered flowers and people lying on the ground in the sleep of death. They also possess a special skin, at times made of a predictable velvety touch and other times of only light, insatiably devoured by the shadows.
The center of the room is occupied by the projection of Le Jardin Féerique (The Enchanted Garden), a video made in 2009, which evokes the fragment of the same title of the suite and ballet by Maurice Ravel Ma mére l’oie(Mother Goose), with no other relationship to childhood than its evocation of fairies. On the contrary, and to my way of seeing, under the French musical notes there slides a story of sensuality and mystery, in which the wood fairies, some as pupae enclosed in their capsule, others prisoners behind a curtain of woman’s hair, as if it were a tapestry of trees drawn among shadows, contemplate the voluptuous caresses between two strangers who are similar, equal, lost in the touch of the tongue between the toes or in the tremendously aesthetic fold of the elbow. Finally, as on other occasions, a mute scream, thickly silent, closes the stage.
The peopled series Transhumances, 1994, is formally linked to the series of objects that we studied previously, as if it were a humanistic variation that sees itself impelled to include the person and, at the same time, most often, hide her appearance in order to give it a greater real presence.
Thus Laura wraps herself in a warm and passionate red fabric and acts out a particular liaison with the architecture of the place and its furniture. It begins as a post-minimalist proposal and culminates in a performance.
But it is also the first time that the artist becomes a model herself and announces or pronounces upon who she is and how she constructs herself and recognizes herself in the feminine universe.
They are images that have something germinal and supportive so that when she presents herself (nude), as in Transhumance I, she is protected and living inside, molding the red cloth into a vulva capable of sheltering herself and contributing to the dream.[vii]
In some way, the Ground Floor also covers the different sentimental texture expressed in Laura Torrado’s work, from immobile submission to the static of the disappearance, from pain to erotic sensuality. I would dare to even talk about the empathy of her objects with the perceiving subject, as if there existed certain contrition of the things in their dealings with humans.
First floor. Me and Myself.
The two pieces of Transhumanceslink the viewer to the works on the First Floor and have a common characteristic: the main character of all the photographs and videos is Laura Torrado herself. They were done in two different periods of time, the larger group between 1994 and 2000, and the videos a decade later in 2010.
The two oldest photos, To R. Hornand To L. Bourgeois. La poupée, pay homage to two other female artists: Rebecca Horn and Louise Bourgeois, women of different ages and times, but who coincided between the 1970s and 1980s in the new formulation of a gender culture.
So Laura Torrado becomes the nude model that dresses with aggressive and false animal horns (R. Horn), or with hanging bags with fringe or tassels, like the breasts of the Artemis of Ephesus or the tears that spilled from her chest (L. Bourgeois). She incorporates both into her material universe, to her baggage of discursive objects.
A piece from the same year, 1994, shows M. Sélavy, female alter ego to the male Duchamp, falsely dressed in epic wear, like the women from the series La femme déguisé, where with dresses made from the same soft material as the objects, the model, with a voluminous turban on her head and an enormous skirt, passes under intense chiaroscuros, through that abandoned building that we already know, as if dancing at an eighteenth century party, from which we don’t hear the music or the chatter of those attending.
If I point it out every time the turned-off noise, shout or voice appear, are cut short or silenced, it is because that verification of the suppression of noise imprints the image of its exteriorization and pronouncement, and is key to the argument of the artist, and is repeated, as much as or more than the voluntary use of the word and poetry.
The set of pieces gathered on this floor can be divided into two large groups, that which includes the “staging of the face” and those that do so in “the drama of the subject.”
The first, Autorretrato II (Self-portrait II), 1994, The Endless Story I, 1999, You, 2009, and the videos The Birthand Selfportrait as Artaud, 2010, unfailingly show the artist, in nearly all of them facing forward (although I believe it would not be wrong to include Youin this group of photographed faces, because although Laura has her back to us, she makes us look at ourselves in the face), adorned or dressed up with ornaments or unique, strange creations, signifiers of an analogy or metaphor which references her being as a person to further accentuate her being as a woman.[viii]
Autorretrato IIpresents her with the image of that which grows and proliferates, as if a thicket of branches stretched across the forehead and cheeks of a beautiful face. We can also imagine it attached to a piece of bloodless coral with anesthesia. In other works in the same series, the accessory and its sculptural background adopt the shape of suspended tears, of a grid-shaped lattice, or a spiral that surrounds the face. In all of them, Laura Torrado’s face is expressionless and distant.
For example, in the series Erased portrait, 1993, she appears with bared shoulders, eyes closed (another detail to follow in her pieces), and the drawing she has traced on the paper glued to the wall continues on her neck. Another shot shows her with a black shirt, also with her eyes closed, and her face covered by the same drawing, like an ornamental veil.
You, 2009, has taken on the starring role not only in this particular section, but also in this set of the exhibit. The pronoun “you” can be “you singular,” “you plural,” and “one.” As I said, this extensive convocation, printed on the nape of the artist’s neck invokes the response of the viewer, at the same time that I would say it whispers the guilt that the temptation infers in the look. The nape of the neck is both the spot for a kiss and the place to give someone a blow to the head. The gesture of putting her hair up and showing us her bare and tattooed neck is undeniably erotic.
Hair has a leading role in the two videos shown on this floor, in the same way that it was essential to the projection of Le Jardin Féeriqueon the Ground Floor.
In The Birth, 2010, birth is likened to the expulsion of a ball of black hairs from the artist’s mouth.
In “Ucello the Hair”, Artaud writes:“Uccello, my friend, my chimera, you lived with this great myth of hair. The shadow of this great lunar hand with which you record the monsters of your brain will never reach the vegetation of your ear, which turns and swarms to the left with every breeze from your heart. On the left the hair, Uccello, on the left dreams, on the left nails, on the left the heart. It is on the left that all the shadows open, the naves, like human orifices. With your head lying on this table where all humanity is capsized, what do you see other than the vast shadow of a hair?”[ix]If we consider that Artaud included these notes among the texts of From Art and Death, 1927, its significance takes us to a balance between invasion of life and the disappearance of the same in which the human avatar passes through.
There is a photo, from the very beginnings of Laura Torrado’s career, which anticipates the motive of the hair. I refer to Selfportrait, 1993, in which the very young artist appears with each eye covered by tassels of hair. We have seen this neutralization of her own gaze in other pieces of her work.
I would say that Mujer-escalera (Woman-Ladder), 1993, occupies an intermediate space between the stagings and the dramas. It is not exactly a self-portrait, as the artist cuts the shot at nose level, leaving her chin, mouth, lips and part of her right cheek and ear in sight, and the absolute stillness of her posture seems to distance it from the dramatic agitation, and yet the ladder drawn on her face and neck, the position of her hands and the apparent indolence of the model awake a mixture of worry and sympathy in the viewer, who involuntarily constructs the scene in which to inscribe it.
Escalera II (Ladder II), 1993, is a full drama scene, which has the space itself in which the acts happen: an indeterminate corner made of white paper, with the image of the ladder once again, now separate from the body of the artist and next to her, dressed completely in black, collapsed by its side, unmoving, as if she has fainted or is asleep.
Like the majority of her works, this is part of a numerous series. The viewer should bear in mind that although there are only one or two examples of the main series in the exhibit, those being the most expressive, what we see are fragments of a more complex construction, of which we will never have absolute truths, but will have sidetracks on which to travel the tale.
So Escalerapresents other options in which the artist, for example, hangs suspended in midair, as if suspended or in levitation or arrogantly rigid, hands pressed to her sides, or dressed differently, now with a white sheet, trying to reach it as if to climb it and flee from we don’t know what inexplicable or immediate threat or danger.
Certain characteristics from these works remained constant during a very long first period of time. For example, in a series not shown, El amante (The Lover), 1993, (which also has variations on the same theme that do not pertain strictly to it, which point to systematic methods of work), the only elements with which she tells the story are an undifferentiated background constructed of wrinkled white paper, her nude body that almost always remains under a sheet, and the movements and dance postures, more or less frenetic, with which she develops what must have been one of her first performances, then translated exclusively to photo shots.
In this context another series is especially relevant, this one very numerous and continuous from one image to the next. It is Serie B. El preludio(Series B, The Prelude),2000, which represents the artist climbing the stairs of a middle-class house as fast as she can, frightened, her eyes hunted and scared, her gestures worried, overwhelmed by a fear of we don’t know what or from where it comes, but which we can define, perhaps the most immediate being a situation of gender violence. But, and I think this is important, it is not the only possible situation, nor necessarily unilateral.
Among the “theaters of the subject” shown, La tormenta en los ojos (The Storm in the Eyes), 2000, is especially important. It is the only series shown in its entirety in the exhibit, which could also be included as a key piece in a more extended chapter on the topic “veiled or covered face” which runs throughout Laura Torrado’s career.
There are five final shots in which the artist, dressed with that black, neutral clothing seen in many other pieces, covers her face with a kind of soft shape, made by her using a piece of fabric and its folds in a series of uneasy gestures, with which she transmits to us the same physical sensations that an invisible face would produce.
In the same way, the diptych The Insidesmakes the same thing with a sheet of clay that covers her like an anonymous mask, with only a hole in the place that corresponds to the mouth, and from which not a sound escapes. A similar role has been played, at times and with the same name, by large tropical flowers that hide parts of the body or face; or violent movements of the head that sweep away the facial features, The Endless Story, 2000, or cosmetics, Mentiras de agua (Water Lies), 2000.
The way I see it, she traces a circle of existence for the female subject in western visual culture, masculinized, that drags real woman towards invisibility to substitute her with the stereotype of woman consolidated in each different and differentiated social time.
Second floor.Stories.
The works on the Second Floor all share the universe of narrative, be it from the proposal itself, either serious or comic, or introducing the verb of the writers or the staged reading of their texts in the visible.
It is well understood that the narrative in Laura Torrado has its own character and its own solidly drawn defining traits. Hers, for as much as I have attributed story qualities to them, are not exactly that. They rarely have a beginning and a final resolution, or an obvious plot.
Now, the artist will directly intervene in some of the pieces but not in all. In others the protagonists of the photos and videos are more or less improvised
models, actresses, actors.
They are either the final moment of a scene of vague origin and uncertain continuity (Si te quise (If I Loved You)and El presentimiento (The Premonition); or the development of a situation in which the artist has composed a script of acts for the different actors (Pequeñas historias bucólicas / Small Pastoral Stories); or a reinterpretation that is pleasant and distanced or disturbingly immersed in the words of the poets (Conversaciones/ Conversationsand Fuga de muerte / Death Fugue); when it is not the composition of images as symbols that inscribe the text and the textual on the skin of the representation itself (Vida suspendida).
Firstly, works from 1995 that combine the domestic and the role of the women in this ideological area are grouped, accentuating the stereotypes and common places of the feminine. Added to this is a way of seeing that immediately brings to mind painting and its paraphrase.
The reproduction of Modigliani’s painting, in the background of the two versions shown of El presentimiento, is a clear and direct reference to the painter’s famous nudes (even in version three, the artist, who also seems to play with the anachronism of her dress, seems as fascinated as interested in the model’s pubis, as in the (for us) odorless perfume that exudes from the perfumer she carries in her hand[x]), while in Si te quise V, Torrado portrays herself half way between Ingres’ style and the nineteenth century odalisques, and calendar girls, partially stretched out on a red cloth, in feline yet modest underwear[xi], with the pilgrim-like accompaniment of some kitchen utensils, pots, slotted spoon and spatula in front of her, like the classic still lifes, and a scandalous green garbage can behind her.
In the same series she portrays herself in the same kitchen, in pants and half nude, covering her breasts with a slotted spoon and a ladle, and stepping on a pair of open scissors with her right foot, in an anomalous mix of classic – I don’t know why I see Caravaggio in it – and modern iconography, with a certain bit of surrealism.[xii]
There is another, in the same domestic space, dressed in a man’s suit, barefoot and wearing a saucepan as a hat, with different scissors at her feet, which make me, as I felt before, think about certain portraits of ecclesiastics and gentry and in Max Ernst’s drawings and paintings.[xiii]
However, the artist tells me that the direct reference is to Frida Khalo’s painting Mira que si te quise, fue por el pelo, ahora que estas pelona ya no te quiero (Look if I loved you it was for your hair, and now that you don’t have your hair I don’t love you anymore), in which the Mexican painter creates a self-portrait dressed as a man, with the scissors still in hand, and her heavy long hair cut and fallen on the floor and around her.[xiv]
On the other hand, throughout her career, the artist has been inscribing on her work a constellation of names that frame a conceptual and sentimental universe: the previously mentioned Rebecca Horn, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, Caravaggio and Frida Khalo herself. I would add Hans Baldung Grien and Max Ernst, and the writers Antonin Artaud, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Silvia Plath and Paul Celan.
Perhaps they coincide in the questioning of the social and gender roles that they each adopted in each specific historical moment, while they represent ways of resistance and adoption of identities that become permanent and pertinent in contemporary society.
Along with the three pieces from 1995 we have already discussed, there is the video Conversaciones,and the photos from Vida suspendida, both from 2010-2011, which in some way confront her proposals with other videos, Pequeñas historias bucólicas, 2005-2007, – as well as various photos from the series of the same name – and Fuga de muerte, 2009.
Several characters from children’s stories and animated films appear in Pequeñas historias bucólicas, like the queen-witch from Snow White, Bugs Bunny and animals from fables. These include the sheep and the pig, which are interpreted by women, on rare occasions semi-nude, and other times by little girls, which make up fixed situations that I consider to be authentic “moral stories,” in which the notion of the educational and the formative as well as elements of confrontation and competency symbolically participate.
There are also cases where one of the characters, especially the queen-witch, is moved to other situations, or if not the character, then her mask and, as such, her significance. Thus she participates as one of the main voices in Conversaciones.
The photo series has its complement or paraphrase in the video of the same title, Pequeñas historias bucólicas, made between 2005 and 2007, in which three actresses, one of them with her face partially covered by a mask, play a strident and convulsive short sonata on children’s instruments (a plastic pan flute) or improvised instruments (a bicycle pump attached to a balloon). It is as annoying to see as it is to hear, obsessive, emitting a sad melancholy, as if to show that it is impossible for adults to share the happy confidence of childhood joys and that the paradisiacal place never really existed.[xv]
There is also underlying the mark of the frustration of those unfulfilled desires, the balloon that will never be inflated, and the senselessness of many adulthood actions and obsessions.
The concatenation between the words of the three suicide poets fascinates me.
The first from Paul Celan, German poet of Russian origin, in his homonymous poem to the video “Death Fugue,” included in his first book, Poppy and Memory, published in 1952 (the year I was born), and considered the best post-war German poem and for many, equivalent in Celan’s work to Guernicain Pablo Picasso’s.
Laura Torrado conceived it as a reading in two times, before and after a children’s game that releases the tension of the speech; a reading produced by the mouth of the reader while she executes a monotonous dance step and another two actresses and an actor participate in both the dance and a game of blind man’s bluff. It thus sets some of the characters from the Celan text: his relationship with music and the compliance with the explicit orders to “touch and dance,” the ties to memory and forgetting, and the permanent imprint of death. At the same time it opens certain questions about the creative act and its ultimate substance, and fixes a certain oscillating artistic position between the metaphysical impossibility and the pressing need of history. From this the closing of the video is, now written, other words by Paul Celan, but these about himself: “There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German… perhaps I am one of the last people who should continue living in order to carry out the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe. That obligation I have felt as a poet, as a poet that could not stop writing despite being Jewish and writing in German…”[xvi]
Issues on an ambiguity similar to what every artist must confront in relation to her instruments and means and her position in the social discourse, are constant reasons for reflection on Laura Torrado’s work.
The second, Conversaciones, her longest, simulates a talk in two successive times, in which the American Sylvia Plath and Englishwoman Virginia Woolf speak. They seem to make up two ways of being a woman and an author as similar as they are opposite. Woolf in some way embodies the hopeful idea of having a room of her own, Plath perhaps wanted to fulfill the dream of behaving like the charmingly perfect woman, even when faced with the brutal and cruel behavior of men. Both came to tragic and, if you will allow me the expression, aesthetically enduring ends. Sylvia Plath, at the age of thirty, left a glass of milk on each of her children’s nightstands and, as you can see in the video, “closed herself in the kitchen, stuffed all of the cracks with towels, then stuck her head in the oven and turned on the gas. When they found her she was still warm!” Virginia Woolf, almost twice as old as Plath, fifty-nine, filled her coat pockets with rocks and walked into the Ouse River, next to her house, where she drowned. Both were ultimately recognized by women as distinct embodiments of feminism. Ironically, both, according to Wikipedia, would currently be diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder.
The image in the video mainly focuses on the mask of the queen-witch from Snow White, reconstructed from ruin when it pretends to be Plath and worn with shameless decorum when it simulates being Woolf. There is a certain air of animated still life, plucking wilted leaves and flowers and tufts of hair, and there swings a strange transparent sack made of grapes in a stocking that swings before your eyes, reminiscent of sculptural objects from years ago. When they do not shout or whisper at each other, they wheeze a tired and intermittent breath.
From the agitated and anxious dialogue there echoes again and again a wish from Sylvia Plath: “I don’t want any more poems.”
Laura Torrado has configured, especially in these two videos, a dramatic representational model made of fragments of published texts, fragments of her own texts, symbolic functional utensils and apparently senseless actions which are closely tied to the author or authoress’ desire.
They face the dark shots of Vida suspendidain which some of the utensils and objects that appeared earlier in her work, such as the cloths and the flowers, but also the clumps of hair, acquire a worn yet un-aged skin, deteriorated by the presumed passage of time. Even the text adheres to the body of the woman like the prayer of a litany of possible and marked actions: “I redeem, I reappear, I retain, I renounce, I gather, I deliver, I join…”
Third floor. Representations.
If there are two series in Laura Torrado’s work that, in my opinion, require the full showing of their components, they would be El dormitorio (The Bedroom)and Hammam, both from 1995. It was not possible, but the viewer should keep in mind the complete sequences in order to calibrate their true reach.
They are for me the artist’s most intense works and make up a woven counterpoint between two universes of existence of women. I have mentally co-existed with these works and have written about them several times in the twenty years since their creation, which has provoked different impressions and generated different interpretations, although they coincide in their general ideas.[xvii]
In El dormitorio, the staging also clarifies the circle of affection that includes, to call it something, the lineage of the loving maternal feeling: we know that they are grandmother and granddaughter, but although we don’t know it, we deduce that there is a tie that unites those women separated by decades of years, that they share the intimacy of the bedroom, that the photographic sequence gathers vital “documents,” such as the crucifix above the bed, the proximity of the Trimline telephone (which places us in a specific moment in time), and the cosmetics and perfumes on the dresser, that show that the old woman takes care of her appearance. Both also share the same type of dress, comfortable clothes that are between those you wear around the house and those that are out of style, and from the different postures one or the other adopt, the viewer composes or imagines not a story, text is missing for that, but a representation or painting of something. The grandmother with her back to us, seated on the edge of the bed while the granddaughter, seated in profile on the other side fixes her hair and appears indifferent. Or perhaps it is the other way around, she is upset by the anxious gesture of the old woman lifting her hand to her neck. The woman stays like that, when the young girl has turned away and faces the viewer, although still at her back. In another, the old woman seems to be talking about some event, or talking about something that happened that involves her and she quickly moves her arm in a gesture of anger or pain, while the young girl, whose gesture and face are invisible, seems to be listening attentively. The most direct shows both of them, the old woman standing and the young girl sitting on the edge of the bed, both of them facing the viewer with a certain uncomfortable rictus, as the viewer has interrupted a private moment with his or her, on the other hand, awaited intrusion.
For Laura, it was her grandmother who kept the family memory and memories of terrible things that happened in this country while bringing her knowledge to the present. A voice that eluded general silence, that was full of significance. Reviewing old photos of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, the composition of a frieze of the own and secret avatars. Confidences.
Hammam, with its exotic title contradicted by the villainy of the place where different and similar scenes take place (a vulgar fish market, in which we distinguish some instruments or tools of the trade, scales and pitchers, boxes and knives and also a vulgar calendar) anesthetizes the erotic of the nudity of the half dozen young women shown as much for the turpitude of the surroundings as, and this is more important, for the static, solitary and independent attitude of the women, that do not even glance at each other, nor do they touch or brush against each other, except in the crudest of situations, when they appear stretched out on their sides on the counter, one against the other, like fish lined up for sale or cattle or other dead animals, Hammam V.
In La Folie Baudelaire, Roberto Calasso makes an assessment about Dégas that jumped out at me for its close connection with Laura Torrado. The Italian writer confirms that “What clashed with Dégas was not the ungainly appearance of the female body, but something much more poignant: the complete abandonment of the canonical gestures”.[xviii]
Further on, he declares: “He was tenaciously looking for those intermediategestures between the canonical, the gestures that do not have a meaning and are only functional, often unconscious, often not even clearly perceived by whoever is doing them”.[xix]
If we think about Laura Torrado’s representation of the feminine, and perhaps a bit on their masculine figurations (although these always seem farther away to me), we see that in the poses and gestures of her protagonists and in the relationships and ties that are established among them,there is also this vagueness between two moments of unknown but, doubtless, differentmeaning.
The third floor is completed with pieces from three different series, chosen from among the many that represent groups of men, or groups of women, in attitudes and situations that frame both a social and personal condition, or fragment the class stratifications or points them out accentuating common defining traits from a specific position.
Although Sherezades’title might make you think that its appropriate place would be the children’s stories, to me this series from 2008 plays with certain differentiating stereotypes between masculine and feminine. An example is the image of two of the three women who appear in the series, wearing silly mustaches, staring questioningly ahead (just like in the rest of the photos from the series). Perhaps, in the opposite sense, when feminine complicities and affects are represented, as in Sherezades. El abrazo.
Prior to Sherezades,there are Las esquinas del espejo (The Corners of the Mirror), 2000; Jardín de hielo (Ice Garden), 2000; Filles modernes, 2001; El relevo (The Substitute), 2006, her most vibrant approach to the idea of the immigrant, the other. In this case, the others, a beautiful, desolate and expectant trio of black women: Las mil y una noches (A Thousand and One Nights), 2003; La rosa de los vientos (The Rose of the Winds)and La rosa de papel (Paper Rose), 2007, the last with two artworks from the exhibit that I will speak about next. Also from 2007 is Masculinos, a quartet of women dressed as executives from the same company, with that corporate trait of similar red ties, wearing the stern gesture of sharks or saddened by economic worries.
In the series La rosa de papelshe submits the images to a fragmentation that only lets you see part of the body of the women in the piece. Two of them are on their knees imploring for we don’t know what, and the third is seated by their side, here a slender woman seated with her legs crossed and an easy way about her, and the other two standing by her side. They are faceless and yes, as I indicated,[xx]have a sculptural composition, with something of a Greek frieze of another type of classic antiquity, which takes us back to the origins and beginnings of the artist, and shows how much her ways have changed.
Finally, two pieces from the photo series, Hammam2013, 2013 not yet completed, and a video The Members, 2004. These are not her only works featuring men; they are also in series Masculino y poder (Masculine and Power), 2003, and the videos L’eté indien, from 2004, and Fuga de muerte, 2009, which we discussed earlier. They confront the ambiguous conventions or the explosiveness of the gesture with those of the viewer, regardless of gender.
The video and even more, Masculino y poder, not exhibited, exemplify her vision of the internal construction of the work world at the top levels of businesses, another convention of gender stereotypes and, in that sense, I recommend the careful reading of the artist’s text in the art grant catalog Generación 2003, where they were shown, because between the lines she makes a commentary that could be applied maybe not to all but to at least a very large part of her work, both in quality and quantity: if in this video in particular women do not participate “it is not a question of gender, but of the values of each gender.”[xxi]
The actors in Hammam2013 are, in a sense, the conceptual partners of the actresses in Hammanfrom 1995 and, at the same time, their opposites. If these exude an isolated sensuality or suffered from their consideration as mere carnal objects, those adopted poses and gestures that move away from masculine exhibitionism, even from the macho world, to their palpable and perceptible feminine content.
I can not resist comparing them to the Picasso models from the Avignon brothel, if we deprive them of moral provocation and only focus on their iconic potential, figures that define the way to confront painting there, figures that outline the way to confront the gender laws in Laura Torrado’s photographs.
Up above, in the water tank, someone is breathing.
[i]Navarro, Mariano. “Laura Torrado”, El Cultural, November 14, 1999. http://www.elcultural.es/version_papel/ARTE/18185/Laura_Torrado/; “Carcoma y pátina. Vanidad de vanidades”, in Vanitas. Canto líquido, Encuentros Collection, Casa de Velázquez, Madrid, 2000, p. 6-14; Navarro, Mariano. “Laura Torrado. Leche negra del alba”. Artecontexto magazine, nº 32, April 2011, p. 63-73. Exhibits and texts from the catalogs: Identidades críticas. Arte español de los noventa, Sala Puertanueva, Córdoba and Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid; Ficciones y realidades. Arte español de los 2000 en la Colección de Arte Contemporáneo Museo Patio Herreriano, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, 2011.
[ii]Baudelaire, Charles. “Salon de 1859”, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. II, 1976, p. 624.
[iii]Calasso, Roberto. La Folie Baudelaire, Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, 2011, p. 247.
[iii]Ibid, p. 21.
[iv]Navarro, Mariano. “Laura Torrado. Leche negra del alba”. Op. cit, p. 63.
[vi]Thus, for instance, the apparently laughable acting of the women in Pequeñas historias bucólicas, 2005-2007.
[vii]The online catalog of Artium has the following information from Transhumance II: “On a somber stage that could be an airport hangar, Laura Torrado (Madrid, 1967) constructs a very careful photograph, of balanced composition, where two parallel elements stand out with: almost a sculptural, corporeal nature and powerful vertical position. A chipped column in the forefront and a slender body, presumably of the artist herself, wrapped in a red cloth like a tunic, which falls elegantly from her head and extends, almost brushing the floor, up until the mentioned column, both elements remaining connected in an unusual dialogue. The austere staging, the dismal lighting and strong presence of the column and the red body recreate a silent, intimate and disconcerting atmosphere, which characterizes all of Laura Torrado’s work. An environment full of oneiric suggestions, a surreal moment that seems to hold some mystery and that, nevertheless, can contain multiple meanings. Is this an anonymous body that hides its identity under a mantle? Is it a sculpture that aspires to be a column? Does it matter? The title of the work, Transhumance II, opens the possibilities of reading and can evoke an endless list of stories.” www.artium.org//Colección/Catálogoonline/tabid/104/language/es-ES/Default.aspx
[viii]Alicia Murría offers a reading on this aspect of her work that I find very revealing. “Using her own image, Laura Torrado creates disturbing self portraits where she herself constitutes the material of the work to embody and give physicality to a complex introspective discourse that alludes to feelings, sensations, perceptions and moods. Her works deeply investigates the being, in individuality, but at the same time her images speak of universal aspects that we can share and in which we can identify.” Also that “Her portraits and self portraits, that are done in series, have something of the theatrical, in the sense of construction and staging, and it is almost secondary that she is a subject, because it is more important what happens in each image that the body itself or the face that appears there.” Murría, Alicia. “Laura Torrado: lugares de intimidad”, cat. Laura Torrado, Actes Sud/Altadis, 2000.
[ix]www.lamaquinadeltiempo.com/Artaud/artaud07.htm(Spanish). From Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings. University of California Press, Berkley, 1976, p. 135 (English)
[x]El presentimiento IIshows Laura Torrado facing forward, reading a page she might have written herself on the typewriter from version I.
[xi]The same leopard-print nightgown she wears in Si te quise I, where she appears simply standing in the kitchen with a cold, fixed stare upon who is looking at her.
[xiv]Written by the hand of Poniatowska, Frida it says: «The hands you are took up the scissors and cut my hair, they scattered the long hairs on the floor, they dressed me as a man, they buttoned the buttons of my trousers and the wrote the song: If I loved you it was for your hair, now that you are bald I don’t love you anymore.” I painted everything, my lips, my blood-red nails, my eyelids, my ears, my eyelashes, my stays, my nudity, my blood, the blood that left my body and they put back in me, the Judas who surround me, the one who cares for my sleep at night, the Judas who inhabits me and who I don’t let betray me. This that you see never wanted to be like the rest; ever since I was a girl I tried to stand out so they would put me on an altar. I always knew in my body there was more life than death. I’ve known since I was a little girl, but then I didn’t care because I learned to combat loneliness. They isolate a sick person. You meet your friends in jail and in bed.”
[xv]Navarro, Mariano. Op. cit, p. 66.
[xvi]The beautiful “black milk” of daybreak anaphora gave me the title for my last until now critical essay on Laura Torrado’s work. Navarro, Mariano. Op. cit.
[xvii]See Navarro, Mariano. “Laura Torrado”, El Cultural. Op. cit.; and also Navarro, Mariano. “Laura Torrado. Leche negra del alba”. Op. cit.
[xviii]Calasso, Roberto. Op. cit., p. 247.
[xx]Navarro, Mariano. Op. cit. p. 66.
[xxi]Generación 2003. Becas de arte. Obra Social Cajamadrid, Madrid, 2004, p. 79.