“Locked in his solitude, the passionate being prepares his explosions or his feats”
Gaston de Bachelard
In his famous essay on the "Poetics of Space", Gaston de Bachelard referred to the house as "the first world of the human being", that place where "a great number of our memories have shelter" and in whose rooms "they incubate the passions".
There is an interesting parallelism between artistic practice and that “own room” that inhabits us as much as we inhabit it ourselves. While private rooms are a precious physical space where we shelter our intimacy, where we dream, console …
“Locked in his solitude, the passionate being prepares his explosions or his feats”
Gaston de Bachelard
In his famous essay on the "Poetics of Space", Gaston de Bachelard referred to the house as "the first world of the human being", that place where "a great number of our memories have shelter" and in whose rooms "they incubate the passions".
There is an interesting parallelism between artistic practice and that “own room” that inhabits us as much as we inhabit it ourselves. While private rooms are a precious physical space where we shelter our intimacy, where we dream, console ourselves, love and establish our links with reality, art is, in turn, an intimate redoubt for exploration, emotion and thought, a symbolic territory where artists can give shape to their concerns, making their works a loudspeaker that transmits their vision of the world. And just like in those dreams where our subconscious explores parallel worlds and lives extraordinary adventures, art is an experiential adventure in which imagination, memory and our impressions play an essential role.
In her well-known story “A room of one's own”, Virginia Wolf referred to the difficulties she had as a creator to write if she did not have a separate space and her finances were assured. Only in this way, she reflected, would she be able to carry out her work with total freedom. In this singular essay based on a series of conferences that the author developed in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College - both women's colleges of the University of Cambridge - Wolf developed the genre of the interior monologue as a way of awakening consciousness, feminist in this case.
The clear similarities between literature and art, as creation processes that are the result of desire and necessity, allow us to affirm that artistic creation is also an "inner monologue", a personal reflection that is shared in images. There is no artist who does not need that space of interior silence and refuge that is her studio or her workshop. It is from there that the images cry out to find their shape in the hands of their creator. It is in that shelter where the work of art is built.
Until the appearance of photography, practically all of the painters, sculptors and drawing masters created in closed spaces. Curiously, their outing in the open air coincided with the release of their role as "chroniclers" of reality. Now, they could speculate, transform, introduce the fourth dimension of time and break a portrait into geometric fragments. Now it was possible to apply thick strokes that the eye would combine in the distance. Or exalt the beauty of the machine and the disturbing entity of the dream territory. Break down, abstract and experiment with the everything and nothing of colour. But this enormous expansion, which brought with it the desire for innovation that would lead the avant-garde and was so beneficial for contemporary art, did not manage to close the power of attraction and the need for study. And so, that intimate place where a piece of work can be freely developed never disappeared, it became rather an analog image of the artist's soul.
I remember the impact caused by the visit to Francis Bacon's studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it had been transferred piece by piece from London in 1998 by donation from his heirs. That visual chaos, that amalgamation of more than 7,000 objects, fabrics and utensils of all kinds, were the best reflection of the artist's tormented interior and his famous portraits of mistreated bodies. At the opposite end of that suffocating space is, for example, the tidy studio left behind by Joan Miró after his death and which is still part of the Fundació Miró a Mallorca heritage. The parallelism between the clarity of his work and the place where he created, his own room in which he spent most of his time, is more than evident.
Likewise, all the artists that make up this artistic project have a symbolic “own room” in the studio or workshop where they create and discuss their intuitions and ideas. From these hermetic spaces, which are silent witnesses to the creative process, will come the pieces chosen for the rooms of the Finca Can Coll, whose guests will establish relationships with them in accordance with their own personality.
The fact of having been selected to share an intimate space temporarily inhabited by different people explains why these creations that evoke the landscape, nature and its elements have contemplative qualities and seek the beauty of the unique and different that surrounds us.
Continuing with the metaphor of "living", we can agree that, in the works of Marta Blasco, Jesús Cánovas, Pere Colom, Jeannine Cook, Pep Girbent, James Lambourne, Luis Maraver, Francisca Martí, Vesna Z. Mimiça, Cris Pink, Horacio Sapere and Antoni Socías also "inhabit" the lessons of so many generations of artists who made nature their main genre. That is to say, that in their paintings, drawings and photographs one can find traces of the emotionality of symbolists and sublime artists, of the colourful passion of plein-air painters or the expressive force of naturalist drawing, but also the knowledge of that contemporary aesthetic that is known to be indebted to so many influences but that does not renounce its particular seduction for the beauty of small things.
In these times of technological fluidity, proposals that still pursue the scent of time in the intangible atmosphere of a landscape or in the simple grace of some flowers are appreciated, works that embrace the present with the ancient soul of painting and that make their chore a source of inspiration and a place of placid observation for the gaze.
Pilar Ribal
