SANDRA VAL

PROJECTING WORLDS. Sandra Val

Starting from an interrogation of the perception of reality and its representation, Projecting Worlds proposes an environment made up of fragments of diverse realities and experiences, which will give rise to a new landscape with different spaces, times, and sensibilities. To achieve this, Sandra Val draws on a broad symbolic universe derived from architectures related to the spiritual, from the temple as a reflective foundation for how individuals relate to their environment. These are elements that have been repeated and reinterpreted time and again, not only throughout our history, but also in other, more distant and ancient civilizations that, without having had any contact with each other, arrived at the same architectural archetypes linked to the divine and power.

Through diverse sources, Val creates multidimensional architectures, cosmogonies where fragments of the environment interact and are continually juxtaposed. A process that begins with the collection of those pieces that have been abandoned and stripped of their history, to then generate with them fictional universes dominated by accident and chance. From the projection of these "counterworlds" a new landscape is born, a place that simultaneously transports us to an innocent image and a failed utopia; one that refers both to the archaic beginnings of architecture and to its end due to the violence of a world we have already exhausted. A state from which we can only escape, according to German psychologist Harald Welzer (2014), in two ways: by disaster or by design, that is, either waiting for our world to collapse and rebuild it from the ruins or transforming the existing world into something new in advance.

This is a setting in which the individual's vital action unfolds and which, like any landscape, is alive. Therefore, it is not silent, but emits its own voice. A sound that speaks to us of its origins and the materials that shaped it, and which, as in his ceramic pieces, will be composed of residues of the creative experience: the cry of the pottery, the roar of the kiln, the vibration of the clay, or the human voice in contact with the porcelain, blending together in a choral symphony that mentally completes this utopian image. A landscape that also deserves to be preserved; therefore, the shadow painting shown here also takes us back to the mythical origins of representation, to a myth recorded in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, which recounts the origin of painting and sculpture and takes us back to 7th-century BC Greece. where a young woman draws with charcoal the shadow of her beloved projected by the light of a candle in order to preserve his image over time. In this same way, Val's paintings are images entangled with the enigma of absence, an enigma to which they owe their deepest meaning. They are not shadows in the sense of a black surface, but rather the duplication of a body in its form, the attempt to contain a glimpse of this world born of the imagination.

We must therefore consider two different, non-superimposed worlds: that of representation and that of reality. But between the two, there is no obligatory symmetrical and isomorphic relationship that would allow us to read the works through a simple hermeneutic. Instead, it will be necessary to situate the signs in the metaphorical realm of an invented time and space and play at reading them within their singular coordinates. A landscape created from the ruins of an already exhausted world, redesigned with a soft and harmonious language that will defend aesthetics as a radical power.

Oscar Manrique