Une géométrie effusive de Gérard Xuriguera

Latin America has long given us proof of its artists’ creativeness, particularly in the field of Op’ Art, and so of constructed art, the more so when it concerns those belonging to the diaspora, mainly established in Paris. Starting out from preexisting fields, they have profitably followed in the footsteps of the pioneers, the Bauhaus and its heirs, and then succeeded in inventing new horizons without betraying the spirit of constructivism.

Agueda Lorano belongs to this fringe of artists seeking new pastures. Of Mexican origin, she could have chosen to become a descendant of the muralist artists of her country, but she preferred to follow the path of order and concision, from which her own perceptions have become inseparable. Based in Paris as early as 1971, after freeing herself from the forms which once characterized her abruptly contrasted workmanship, she has now opted simultaneously for both abstraction and sculpture.

Episodic at the outset, her painting conserved organic reminiscences, before gliding towards strongly structured non-figuration. Nevertheless, although she employs contructed forms like fractions of mathematical laws, her expression avoids constructivist orthodoxy, because she aspires towards another dimension, freer in its content, in which form depends more on the curve than the square. Indeed, throughout her pictural peregrinations, the planes, in turn, ondulate, bend, fold, and above all secrete indentations veiled by cross-strokes, with recurrent gaps on the edges, like jagged embankments or high crumbling cliffs which conjure up imaginary landscapes or moving galaxies. Further, her lunar cartographies, composed of embedded, split pieces, surge vertically upwards, veiled in modulating tones, giving a glimpse of the sharp stroke and its impact, and the authority of the brush. Here is an interaction between intervals and proportions, the coordination in their exchanges, which dictates her mode of expression. But from Mondrian to Malevitch, Agueda has taken up the harmonies, rather than the architectural aridity. Now, on an adjacent slope, the field spreads outwards in diverse horizontal bands of muted colours, which can be seen as alluding to Rothko’s ventails.

And yet, although her style is independent, her syntax does not spell out fantasy, because her credo is in the research of absolute form. Yet again, although her vocabulary relies on certain formative elements, the flux of intuition filters through her textural particuliarities and sceneries, whilst retaining levels of interiority.

Parallel to this, Agueda Lozano’s sculpture shows kinship to her painting. Cut from steel, coiled or compressed, dynamic or static, chipped in outline or swelling in surface, mirroring or opaque, oblique or upright, composed of one unique piece or of several contiguous elements, her sculpture manifests the same will to express what is essential, and the same precision in organizing the volumes. Facing open space, Agueda Lozano proceeds by assembling asymetrical forms which are often jagged, and fit together in an upward surge, contained by several metallic rods forming a triangle, or sometimes resting directly on the ground. Elsewhere, her frameworks take on a totemic shape, in the form of a median axis flanked by a column half-twisted around itself. Always in fictionally unstable equilibrium, the hollowed-out volumes are confronted by others, more dense, in a tightly controlled pitching. Further on, the definition of the units becomes clearer. They claim their autonomy by approaching minimalist neutrality. But the felicitous combination of tension between the rifted planes and the full planes, the edges, the incidences of light, and the smoothness of convex lines, brings us a synthesis of opposites. « I am a geometer », said Gaudi, « which means synthetic ».

This is how to approach Agueda Lozano’s effusive geometry. With just this balance of gliding rhythms and rigorous harmonies, impulsing the poetics of matter and space which go far beyond appearances, she drives us towards those territories where action and meditation become one measured as powers of sublimation.