The lucid atelierBy Susana Blas
«The world comes to be painted at my studio” Courbet «What remained was the feeling of a dream in which I was voluptuously delayed. Some deep aim had been achieved, but before having time to interpret its meaning, the board had been erased and I had been thrown out, to a world whose only answer for everything was death.» Henry Miller, Sexus Perhaps all of the artwork by Soledad Córdoba can be understood as an extended self-portrait in which her atelier has maintained an invisible presence. In these indiscernible spaces, she worked on secret acts over the years of which her photographs are the remnants. Unfinished or disjointed stories always closer to what we understand of dreams than waking life. In Limbo (Temps d’un voyage), a project completed in her last studio in Paris, a smooth change in direction from the previous series may be offered. Suddenly the studio takes prominence and even seems to substitute or fade out the artist, although the idea of self-portrayal perseveres in a white room with an apse, which seems sacred without preserving worship. An interesting tradition exists of the fusion of the creator and their studio, and there may not be a more iconic example than The Painter’s Studio by Courbet in 1855. In the famous painting, the shift is to a self-portrayal in his studio and the transformation of this into an emotional diary of the artist. The title could not be more precise: The Painter’s Studio, A Real Allegory, Summing up Seven Years of my Artistic (and Moral) Life. Adding to his writings: «The world comes to be painted at my studio… They are the people who help me, support me in my idea, and participate in my work. They are the people who live off of life, who live off of death…» Soledad Córdoba also shows her studio as a memory machine, as a double, and fills it with still lifes, symbols of the motionless, objects of the dying and of nightmares. It coincides with those who believe that all occidental thought was constructed overvaluing the waking life and disregarding the dream experience. Fortunately, philosophies like Hinduism incorporate this form of consciousness as something «real» and natural. I cannot resist viewing Limbo (Temps d’un voyage) as a beautiful swaying threshold between the waking life (i.e. in an extreme emotional situation), the daydream, the deep sleep, and even as an attempt to go deep into those called «lucid dreams» or consciousness of the dream state. Games of the waking life, “rêverie”, and dreams. I will allow the spectator to decide which category each images belongs to. It will not be easy and there will be its unclear virtue. In the three territories, there are symbolic objects that act as fundamental elements of the artist as in the previous series. The skulls, the dead bird, and the shroud seem like remnants of this intermediate state that describes the Sufi tradition between living and sleeping. I go further to say that in some images Soledad seems to confront and defeat her monsters. With her imagination, she changes their texture, makes them disappear in the clouds, or transforms them into the abandoned dress which is destroyed with conviction before our eyes. |