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Come and Go: Stargazers
Original title: Va y ven: miradores de estrellas
1996
-1997
Wood, methacrylate, satin, fluorescent lights and synthetic fibre
Dimensions: 48.5 x 379.5 x 245 cm
Reference: ACF0707
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Since the late eighties, the time when she moved to New York, though due not to that, but to an inner process of reflection, Victoria Civera's work has developed simultaneously in painting -an activity she has never abandoned- and installation, in which she uses both everyday objects and others she has made herself and which have some kinship with the ones we normally find around us. In recent years she has also taken an interest in video.
Civera's paintings are generally small or medium-sized, with a certain preference for the circular format, monochrome or with few colours which, in most of the pieces, are very sober, with a predominance of black and smoky grey, and on occasions brilliant reds or bright blues. The shapes are usually very simple, yet just right and refer to organic or heavenly elements. Like A-be-ce-da-rio, her works usually consist of small groups, in which the individual pieces lend one another meaning.
In the words of Alisa Tager, "whilst Civera enriches her vocabulary of shapes and images, her paintings conserve a subtlety and intrigue that draw the spectator into an attractive, enigmatic world. She continues to observe and select what is essential to capture the quintessence of a landscape, an object, the memory of a contact or an intimate moment. By conjuring up memories and feelings, her pictures reverberate like manifest incarnations of a personal intimacy."
From about 1993, Civera began to make small sculpture-objects which grew in size and complexity until they became real constructions, rooms, which refer to her own identity and memory. It is as if, by looking at ourselves, we can rebuild both past and present in a single image. They are, moreover, representations of her femininity, not in the militant sense of other contemporary artists, but revealing a kind of sensibility that deploys a poetic charge as intense as it is profound.
That is the impression conveyed by the stargazers, sexless childlike dolls lying on a bed of light; they are also blind. In the exhibition catalogue for the Soledad Lorenzo Gallery, where they were shown for the first time, another photograph of the same piece in the country at night was added to the one in her installation and, if possible, it heightens the introverted loneliness of these anonymous, unattached, prone "rag dolls", lying on a box which seems to house the invisible moon. The display was entitled "Madre luna" in reference to a moth that we can only see in the light of that nocturnal heavenly body.
