MUDANZAS

Image Sphere

The work of Charo Pradas seems to change with the arrival of each new decade. In the 1980s, when she first came to prominence, she produced surrealist paintings populated by plants or animals as primitive as they were fictitious, recalling microorganisms and insects. In the 1990s, a process of abstraction of those early images transformed them, through muscular gestures, into eyes, spirals, and targets. Now, the new decade brings us liquid paintings of melted images. The dynamism of earlier curved movements disappears to give way to new dense and floating spaces.

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The circular forms in Charo Pradas’s work of the 1990s seemed to arise from a kind of dance, recording the very energy that originated them, transformed into pictorial image. The circle and the spiral were the dominant manifestations of this exercise, clearly referring to mandalas and cosmological ideas. Images of a static dynamism became metaphors for the ultimate meaning of art: the representation of that which cannot be represented. And now, far removed from the utopian moments of the avant-gardes, it would indeed be impossible to offer us, merely for our delight, forms and colors that aspire to purity—art for art’s sake resting on the novelty of a specific language.

Charo Pradas’s paintings showed movements toward both the interior and exterior of the canvas, which were as contradictory as they were coincident, speaking to us of the formal and the spiritual, while also suggesting—acting as a bridge between two points—that the viewer must become complicit in their interpretation. The paintings, in any case, explained themselves, seeking in their generative center both their reason for being and their origin and structure. They were maps of the tensions and energies that generated them, while also being finished images. Paths that were also goals, and that constituted powerful metaphors. Undoubtedly, they recalled techniques of meditation or contemplation, and how the inner journey is a powerful means of understanding the world.

In the 1990s, just as in the celebrated self-portraits of Joan Miró — the figurative one preserved at the MoMA (Self-Portrait I, 1937–38) and the abstract one preserved in Detroit (Self-Portrait II, 1938) — themselves renowned for their spiritual symbolism, the eye becomes for Charo Pradas the instrument of both outward and inward vision, in parallel with, for example, the theories of colour photisms that illustrate the centuries-old techniques of Sufi meditation. Of course, they also referred us to Marcel Duchamp’s rotorreliefs, which, although intended as an ironic take on the hypnotic powers of art, demonstrated the simplicity with which certain effects of immense potential can be produced.

Now, Charo Pradas’s new images seem to show an interest in new possibilities. They are veiled images that still suggest an even greater inwardness. These are less dogmatic paintings because they are more open, filled with contradictory movements and hidden situations. The viewer’s gaze no longer follows a determined path shaped by symmetrical physical forces, but instead gets lost or slips at will among drips and aqueous displacements. Colours themselves mix and contours blur. Space no longer expands outward; instead, it now only grows inward, like the space of a computer screen.

Indeed, some paintings suggest rectangular forms: doors and windows that produce the same metaphorical possibilities as eyes, suggesting thresholds to be crossed and other places or spaces. The remaining curved forms become springs or stretches, underlining a possibility of change or perpetual flow. At first sight, these blurred new surfaces suggest scepticism or doubt regarding a previous situation. In a sense, the artist deforms or erases what had been her characteristic iconography, and here we might see an exercise in renunciation. I believe, however, that it is the result of a calmer or more mature vision of things.

In some way, it no longer suggests the possibility of an inner world, but rather presents a version of it. A scenography that proposes a suprasensible perception of the sensible, in which shifting colours are examples of inner visions. From the spatial choreography of symmetrical rhythms one arrives at a personal metaphysics of light. Depth is no longer generated through spiral movements, but through glazes, superimpositions, and horizontal and vertical directions. The ambiguity of Charo Pradas’s new paintings seems to tell us, wisely, that the immutable dwells within continuous movement. Or also that greatness is vulnerable.

Enrique Juncosa, 2001