If we break a stone and the fragments of that stone, the pieces we will obtain will still be stone pieces. The real is suitable for infinite exploration; it is never-ending.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
We approach contemporary artistic productions from different aspects, which are equivalent and interdependent: shape, color, concept, technology, matter. For some contemporary artists, matter is, in fact, the one that foretells shape and translates the idea. They think and feel that matter is not only a rigid substance that supports and structures an image, but also a force that conveys its own meaning. The conception and practice of these artists allows opposite and complementary poles to cross each other and live together in their works: one is visible and weighty materiality (in the strong, archaic sense) and the other is invisible, ethereal immateriality, present in all sublimation processes.
In her recent works, Beatriz de la Rúa has considered the choice of two materials which man has been manipulating since remote times: paper and stone. Given the artist’s sensitivity to their respective qualities, she works with them with equal poetical intensity, but with different means and intentions. When dealing with her artistic production from the materials viewpoint, she enhances the physical, chemical and technical processes, accidents, automatisms and marks that her work gives rise to. She exhibits the results of the vicissitudes she experiences. For instance, rice paper subjected to the action of Indian ink, humidity, evaporation and time. The stain is a being of imprecise contours, which overflows and leaves halos, filaments and aureoles that evoke aquatic, dusty worlds, full of shadows and stories. In the inks and gouaches on paper from her series called Water Threads, silky black stains and diaphanous gray lines make paper reverberate, exhibit its roughness and opacity, its porosity and its strength. Its white surface does not just act as a simple receptacle or flat support for the liquids that go all the way through it, smear it and contaminate it. On the contrary, paper uses the inks and water to show itself in its paper reality. Spectators of her works should alternatively look closely at them and then view them from a distance, with attention, patience and slowness. At close sight, we will find a great number of small perceptions, details, tonalities, textures and movements: the effect is tactile-optical. From a distance, chaos finds an order, the composition appears and global shape makes sense: the effect is now only optical.
Since 1987 Beatriz de la Rúa has been using stone in her works, and since 1996 she has been collecting them specifically in Mexico and Brazil: they form the found stones Series and the found pieces Series. There are blue and green agates, white quartz, amethysts and other hard stones. Her intention is not to classify them in order to create a collection. They are the raw material for new works, which are in full development.
In one of these series, the work is the stone itself, with no alterations made by the artist, except for written and graphic information about its origin and characteristics. It is important to explain that her election is not arbitrary: the piece was seen by her eyes, caressed and weighed by her hands, it was “tried and tested” once and again (there are no equivalences among plants and, likewise, there are no equivalences among stones). The election of a rock crystal of specific shape and dimension, transparency and weight is a sensitive experience and also a creative action in a peculiar and untransferable “here and now”. Stones are not only chosen because of their rough outer layer or their translucent bands, their concentric veins or their porcelain brightness, their optical illusions or geometric reflections, but also because they are part of an esthetic operation that is projected in the art context.
In another series of works, the artist designs and operates on the stone through a craftsman who cuts it into two sections: the result is, for example, a hydrolyte cut in a way that shows its interior. That is, its frozen successive layers, its paralyzed contractions, its crystallized, tormented mud, its obscure central cavity, its sharp fragments, its confusing, chaotic magma. Daylight penetrates the broken stone, forces and uncovers its intimacy but not its mystery.
Nowadays, the artist performs digitalized processes that record and combine photographic images of stones together with images of her drawings on paper. This “alchemy” reveals the superposition of the leaden grays of gouache ink and the hard veins of stone, the refulgence of paper and the density of stone. These in-progress hybrids remind us of the figurative silhouettes of clouds: we evoke larval life, indecisive ruins, alphabet traces, fugitive ghosts, concentrations of indecipherable signs and gauntly constellations that are permeable to light. When looking at these works, we know or imagine that our evocations are, in fact, variations with no logic or purpose, plays of oppositions and contrasts between transparency and opacity. In short, it is the technological optical-chemical-electronic medium the one that illuminates and reconciles two materials of different origin: paper and stone.
It often occurs that in the great cycles of nature, chromatic, tactile, dimensional and formal correspondences arise between the vegetal and mineral kingdoms. With her works, Beatriz de la Rúa states there are no amorphous or passive, neutral or blind kingdoms. She suggests other correspondences between matter and shape, other fluctuations between the imaginary and the real, other links between the visible and the invisible, other symmetries between the lightness of inked paper and the heaviness of polished stone.