proximity effect

Gilda Picabea

about PROXIMITY EFFECT

If something stands out in the way Gilda Picabea builds her work, it is the conception of the whole. Each piece presents a possible figure of a continuum formed by the succession of possibilities that arise from each compositional process. Some variations propose perceptive games that contradict what we tend to see a priori. What happens if the eye stops closer to the edge? If it provokes a condensation of chromatic stimuli whose attraction refuses the size of the circles? These are not only exercises for the eye, as they could be in trompe l'oeil. In Picabea's work, sight is the means to reach a whole perceptive system, which is what, in reality, she intends to move. 

The link of her work with the postulates of the Asociación Arte Concreto Invención -Argentine avant-garde of the 1940s- does not only reach the use of geometry but also its most utopian aspiration: that of problematizing visual structures that are part of the acceptance of a dominant order. The definition of ideology as false consciousness demanded, for that group of Marxist artists, that art acts as a demolisher of conventions installed in the common sense of art history and the ways of relating to the world. Those compositions tried to interrupt the dream of the enchanted spectator, alerting him to the consequences of a system of representation that hides just that: that it is not a transparent window to things as they are. It presents itself as a tangible reality of the world, not what it is: a constructed thing, a cutout with a particular intention.

The works presented by Gilda in Proximity effect explore the topics of that avant-garde, crossing them with contemporary influences. Her movements are tenuous, with slight displacements that alter the expected compositional mechanisms. The edges, the center, the background, and the figures, the entire pictorial space, become the stage for meticulously arranged relationships, only to be altered later. The effect of proximity results from a stopped time, a state of calm in which the spectator can suspend his certainties to perceive the unexpected.

Mariana Cerviño, November 2022

Translation Carolina Buzzetti

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