Concha García

CONCHA GARCÍA

“DEEP IN THE FOREST”
Opening: Saturday 25th April 2009 / 12m – 14:30 h
Exhibition: from April 25 th, to May 30 th 2009

And when the storm roars screeching through the forest, when giant fir trees plunge, sweeping down and crushing neighbouring branches, neighbouring trunks, and when they fall the hills, dull, hollow, thunder: then leadest thou me to the cavern safe, show'st me myself, and my own heart becomes aware of deep mysterious miracles… Thus from desire I reel on to enjoyment and in enjoyment languish for desire.
Faust (Goethe)

A forest is a place that you peer into or you enter aware of being at the threshold of the forbidden, where any unexpected thing can happen. It represents that almost dizzy need of getting lost – that need that encourages us to cross the limits of the established. Those who do not dare to penetrate into the forest will never arrive at that safe cavern where the mysterious miracles of one’s heart are revealed.

Argullol says: “Romantic travel is always a search for the self. The romantic hero is, in dream or in reality, an obsessed nomad. He needs to run ample spaces – as ample as possible – to free his spirit from the suffocating air of limitation.”

The project that we are presenting here raises the question of the individual’s experience as related to his surroundings through extremely fragile porcelain and glass objects, or objects as close, daily and domestic as furniture structures – a metaphor for that forest devised as a big stage set in which we believe ourselves dwelling safely. Meanwhile, at the other side of the barrier, is Nature: hazardous, chaotic and menacing. In our organised and daily stage set, the flight of a bird makes air acquire life, and we, surprised by its fluttering, look at ourselves, perplexed, like in a mirror, faced to that reality. It is Nature that demonstrates the individual’s fragility, altering the monotony of daily things, exposing the individual to chaos, putting into question our control over our own lives.

Included in this project is an animation taken from Hitchcock’s film The Birds. The viewers’ presence interferes with it, their presence in the room – just as it will cause a perturbation in the film. The birds are just symbols of our fears.

In art, maybe everything is a stage set that, like the luxuriant forest of life, invites us to be surprised so that we face desires and fears. Perhaps, more than ever, the individual, as the romantic hero, should enter the forest to free his spirit from the suffocating limitations of constructed society. This project intends to question the viewers’ search in the art stage set.
Those who as viewers peer into this forest perhaps will just find themselves seeking in their own caverns.

Some delicate porcelain – broken, cracked, reconstructed in a vain attempt to return it to its early condition, clearly prove the possibility of a non-existence, the fragility of our stage set.
In his posthumous work Fragments of a Future Book, Valente wrote this poem:
From you there are left no more/ than these broken fragments./ Let someone pick them up with love, I wish to you,/ have them close to him and do not let them/ die completely in this night/ of voracious shades, where you, already defenceless, still throb.

Concha García. Fúcares Gallery (April 2009)