Pilar Albarracin, note de Séville — Vallois@home
En collaboration avec la galerie GP & N Vallois, Slash accueille le projet en ligne Vallois@Home qui ouvre depuis plusieurs semaines une fenêtre sur les artistes qu’elle défend et invite à développer une nouvelle lecture des enjeux de leur création en un temps qui met à l’épreuve les corps et les volontés. Pilar Albarracin offre ici un texte saisissant qui rappelle la passion brûlante d’un artiste pour son œuvre et le monde dans lequel il s’insère.
Note from Seville:
“In these troubled and uncertain times, my studio remains the perfect place where everything seems possible. Everything can enter and everything is in order.
After years of work, I have learned to listen to what my ideas tell me. I like to let them tell me the manner in which they would like to take shape. It is an exercise that forces me to abandon preconceived notions and to be attentive to new options because exceptions that do not prove the rule are often the most conducive to formulating these ideas.
Art, as I understand it, is a space of resistance, of continuous experience, a laboratory of subversive alchemy from which arises and grows the counter-culture. Not by fashion but by pure coherence because today, who could doubt that the personal is also political!
I “burn” with questions about the role of the artist:
Where does artistic practice end? With the artist’s work? With the artist’s life? When can we consider that a work is finished? When it has taken shape or when the artist no longer has control over it?
We are involuntary witnesses to the transformations of this world. What is there to do in such a context? Half a century ago, thanks to the convergence of various circumstances, some of us were able to identify what we did not want to become, and resisted; it was the Movida in Spain for example… Today, art loses its force and in most cases is inevitably devoured by the system, by this mirage of the dominant culture which advances inexorably and perverts everything through complacency.
For me, art is a weapon and a soul.
Forms are only the envelopes of our passions and our transformative willpower. It seems to me that the artists’ current endeavor is to help recover a form of illusion; to create new utopias.
There are many individual struggles that complement each other and, as the ‘Ariero’ proclaimed, “It is not about getting there first but knowing how to get there.”
Sometimes we find pathways for our attitudes to be in accordance with our principles; however, finding a way of life through dedicating oneself to art seems much more abstract. As for me, like the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano, “I prefer dangerous freedom to quiet servitude”.
Art to which we have decided to devote ourselves must help facilitate, transmit, educate, conceive new liberating meanings and create aesthetic horizons.
Every day is the perfect day to begin."