Obsidional is understood as everything that arises in a besieged place during a war, originated directly or indirectly by the armed conflict. This definition applies to what are known as weeds, which grow in areas devastated by bombs, among the ruins, often brought by the military themselves, who unknowingly carry seeds stuck to their soles or spores on their clothes. The artist Carmen Alvar (Madrid, 1989) has decided to reclaim this unforeseen vegetation, labeled as bad and very undervalued, in her second individual exhibition at Sala Parés, framed within the emerging art festival Art Nou.
Alvar has been working with Parés since 2018, thanks to the Art35 competition, organized by the gallery on Petritxol street and Banco Sabadell. Since then, she has become one of the few young artists that the Barcelona gallery, the oldest in Spain, has in its portfolio. With an offer made up of more than 30 professionals, only five are women ---in addition to Alvar, there are Dominika Berger, Leticia Feduchi, Gloria Muñoz and Brigitte Szenczi--- and few were born after the sixties, with five artists, of whom, only Alvar and Adrián Espinós (1985) have not yet passed forty. The majority are artists who were born in the sixties, although those who did so in the fifties also have considerable weight.
With the exhibition Paisajes obsidionales (Obsidional Landscapes), which can be visited until Saturday, September 10, after the holiday break, Alvar has addressed one of her great themes, if not the main one, memory. "Weeds serve as an excuse for me to interpret the ruins and show how, despite the destruction of war, which seems to end everything, something new, remote and not necessarily native can grow," she explains. From there, the Madrid artist offers a series of readings of the landscape as a ruin and space of memory, accompanying them with different plants and formal approaches, from collage, her most used technique, and painting to sculpture.
A series of five drawings with everyday scenes is invaded by weeds, as a reminder that war can disrupt everything. From peasant women to a choir of girls playing and sisters reading in a courtyard. "Any of these scenarios could become an obsidional landscape," she remarks. All these moments of life Alvar has rescued from the pile of photographs she buys in markets like El Rastro in Madrid, a small paradise that "makes its stalls a place of rest where passers-by meddle in the lives of individuals who have already disappeared." The drawings of these snapshots, handmade with pencil, are accompanied by the silhouette of the plant which, in turn, has its double in a painting next to it, isolated and gaining the importance it has never had.
Cutting and taking advantage of everything that is left over, such as the support from which she has obtained the silhouette of a weed, is one of Alvar's constants. Where it is most appreciated is in the series of Portable Landscapes, created from the leftover material of the students of one of the classes she teaches, focused on collage. When they look for characters and discard the backgrounds of the photographs they cut out, she keeps them and turns them into new scenarios: "I don't use a single photograph to create a mountainous space, but rather I create a new landscape from fragments of others. As sometimes happens with memory, which is built with different memories." This part of the current exhibition, in which she acts a bit like a film editor, is the one that connects most with the first one she starred in at Sala Parés, titled Vestiges and Foundations (2019), where she analyzed ruins from a more architectural and less botanical point of view than now.
Perhaps the part of the exhibition where the war is most evident is the one where grenades cover an entire wall. Despite the violence instinctively associated with them, the artist has given them a new, delicate coating, with plant representations that have traditionally been the protagonists of peninsular ceramics and that may be familiar from "having seen them in grandparents' homes or during visits to the village." "I thus distort the use of the object and relieve it of its negative connotations, which allows for the beautification of ruin and destruction, as obsidional plants also do," she explains.
The different approaches she has made in Sala Parés to memory, landscapes, and weeds converge in the homage to the surrealist painter Maruja Mallo and her work La sorpresa del trigo (The Surprise of the Wheat), inspired by the arm she saw grasping a loaf of bread in a May 1st demonstration in 1936. Alvar adapts it, taking into account that it is a plant that sprouts from hands immersed in the crowd, which can turn into chaos like ruins, and takes her hands as a model, "establishing a close dialogue" with Mallo: "I am a contemporary artist who looks to the past and to her, and I bring her to the present so that she does not fall into oblivion."
The exhibition is completed with more surprises, always timely, such as the tangle of childhood memories that a kite can represent or fabrics that highlight another oblivion, the trades that are lost in emptied Spain. "They are fundamental to understanding who we are today," she defends and thinks of other artists like Rodrigo Cuevas and the Tanxungueiras. Each of the pieces, all painted with plant motifs that were abundantly represented in historical textiles, is accompanied by a shuttle, without thread, to further visualize what is intangible. "It is essential to remember that an important part of our heritage comes from the rural world and, the moment its creators disappear, their trades will disappear with them. Thus, the material culture collected in museums will be more difficult to contextualize, being less understandable by not knowing how it was executed," she emphasizes.
When Alvar's weeds are taken down from the walls of the Parés and stored in its warehouses, the gallery will inaugurate a major exhibition dedicated to Guillermo Pérez Villalta (Tarifa, 1948), his first solo show in the gallery. On the occasion of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, it will mark the return of the Andalusian painter to the Catalan capital after two decades. He will do so by reviewing his last ten years of work with more than 70 works, including tempera on wood and canvas, watercolors and pencil drawings, as well as a selection of personal objects that accompany him in his creative process.