Page 35 - Nada temas, dice ella

religions of East and West, styles and models. Some works are openly dramatic, others tend towards a tenuous lyricism; some of them emphasise pain, others the mystery of everyday life; some stress the sublimity of faith, others transfig- ured spaces and landscapes; some recreate sensitive and bodily experiences
of ascents, voices, illuminations, the tension of ecstasy or the ritual of amorous contemplation; finally, others are metaphors of the isolation that weighs on
a woman when she undertakes a mission against the flow. All the works are enveloped by a solemn atmosphere; they speak the biographical language of the soul, of intimacy; they are made of mobile substances and hazy, indistinguish- able materials; bodies or languages become artistic media. Their backs turned to the world, they agree with that desire to lead art to extreme frontiers and make its personal theatre of the soul visible.
maría bolaños
Director of the Museo Nacional de Escultura
Notes
1. Barnett Newman, ‘The Sublime Is Now,’ in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, John P. O’Neill (ed.), University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992, pp. 170-173. 2. Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Art et théologie,’ Encyclopædia Universalis (online, http://www. universalis.fr/encyclopedie/art-et-theologie/).
3. See André Grabar, Los orígenes de la estética medieval, Madrid, Siruela, 2007, a compilation
of texts by Grabar. In English, see Byzantine Painting: Historical and Critical Study, Skira, Geneva, 1953, and Early Medieval Painting from the Fourth to the Eleventh Century: Mosaics and Mural Painting, Skira, New York, 1958.
4. In his work Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993, Hans Belting has extensively proved how the modern emergence of ‘art’ overturned the traditional notion of the image in Christianity.
5. Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art, translated from the French by by Anne-Marie Glasheen, Reaktion Books, London, 1995.
6. Catherine Grenier, La Revanche des émotions. Essai sur l’art contemporain, Seuil, Paris, 2008. 7. Saint Teresa of Avila, Autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila, translated from the Spanish by
E. Allison Peers, Dover Publications Inc., New York, 2010, chap. 28. On this issue, see Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume One, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, translated from the French by Michael B. Smith, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992.