Memoria Orgánica, Pilar Barreiro

Curator: Catalina Bunge
Curator on venue: Cecilia Tello D´Elia
Artist: Pilar Barreiro
Location: Fundación Verde
Date: 3 de mayo - 2 de junio 2023

Memoria Orgánica, Pilar Barreiro

Barreiro explores her own universal organic memory as a political act, with the intention of disconnecting from the academic legacy as a teacher and student (a "correct" Western and rational heritage). In doing so, she denounce the modes of knowledge production inherent in the "Enlightenment" and later modern eras, as well as the validation of intellectual thought as the supreme truth. Through a process of emptying themselves, she seeks to connect with painting and let it speak for itself. Barreiro depicts allusions to that uncontaminated primary memory on the canvas. She strives to connect with that pure state and create from there, abstracting themselves from their journey as an artist.

Her deconstruction also involves a process of dehumanization in order to become more humanly real, free from all acquired concepts. She contemplate themselves beyond their human essence and the process of individualization and personification that it entails. At the same time, sublimation as a resource allows them to process experiences of motherhood (such as traumatic cesarean sections and induced abortion) that their rational mind fails to do. According to Pilar, "Sublimation is organic memory alive. It is the connection between past and present, between the unconscious and conscious, it is the timeless moment."

Her work include spontaneous gestures and the unveiling of that organic memory. The result is abstract, expressive, and gestural painting, with color as an ally in that relationship. It is a work that refers to the beginning of all art, to the origin. The artist's expressiveness and her uterine experiences in their purest state as unique protagonists. Total abstraction is part of their proposal, with color as an "irritable color" that escapes mandates and past legacies.

Barreiro´s life and pictorial work are permeated by motherhood, nurturing, and gestation. There is a direct connection between the act of gestation-mothering and the creative act; in the middle, the artist seeks to capture and perpetuate this encounter. The plastic language and contact with that organic memory allow them to subvert the sensations, memories, and ideas attributed to those moments. By revisiting her own origin and organic memory, Barreiro deconstructs themselves as an artist, as a mother, and as a pregnant woman. And in that process, they rewrite their present free from conditioning.

Her work reflects a respectful gaze towards the spontaneous instinct of creativity and uses it as a preferred language to tell their story and vision. She employ the universal code still used by children who are not yet dissociated from their organic memory. The goal is to connect with the mystery of creation and its own magic. The origin of everything, an absolute state of nothingness and everything, free from categories, representations, or history.

In Barreiro's work, contemplation is structured as a rhythm (in the style of Walter Benjamin). The artist presents abstract-expressive works with color and gesture as fundamental elements. Their pictorial and plastic works generate an auratic state and, consequently, a strange sense of distance and closeness. When contemplating their work, will distant echoes of our own organic memory resonate within us?

Catalina Bunge