Berta Cáccamo at Museo Patio Herreriano de Valladolid
After residing in Barcelona, Paris, and Rome, Berta Cáccamo returned within the mid-Nineteen Nineties to her native Galicia, the place she made “Horas felices” (Completely happy Hours), a sequence of one-line abstractions through which a thick, sinuous brushstroke expands throughout every canvas, folding in on itself like an gut. The sequence lends its title to this exhibition, which brings collectively work by the artist dated from the late Eighties to 2018 alongside notebooks, sketches, annotations, and a group of knickknacks and discarded objects.
These years map a trajectory, from the discreet informalism of her early output, to the embrace of a extra autonomous stroke—gradual and meandering—to colourful abstractions, to a extra process-oriented method open to numerous mediums and strategies. In untitled works from 1990, the paper absorbs the ink, creating natural marbling patterns. Different instances, as in Blue, 1996, the comb is dragged in order that, with the winding or straightness of the gesture, paint accumulates on the sides of the stroke or is dispersed by the motion of the bristles. From her personal statements, we all know that Cáccamo conceived of portray as a technique of introspection the place literature and philosophy additionally performed a component. Right here, we’re disadvantaged of her phrases, left to someway content material ourselves with a physique of labor lower tragically brief with the artist’s loss of life in 2018, at age fifty-eight. Seeing how the identical motifs and colours emerge repeatedly in her work, we are able to fantasize that portray, even within the absence of its creator, continues to converse together with her.
Translated from Spanish by Michele Faguet.
— Joaquín Jesús Sánchez
