From nature

Jorge Mora

It was a sunny May morning. La Laguna, as always, was bathed in that freshness that tends to slip into the bones of those of us who aren’t natives. I had arranged to meet my friend Vicky Pérez in some square near La Concepción so we could arrive together at the home–studio of Cristina Gámez and Tahiche Díaz. In very little time (no more than what passes between a “good morning, it’s a pleasure to meet you…” and a somewhat abbreviated conversation on the way inside), I moved from the garden and its grounds into another dimension. Suddenly, I found myself surrounded by handcrafted objects, looms, easels loaded with sketches, Hippocratic burins, and a heap of contraptions drawn from what seemed to be their only possible stages. Cristina and Tahiche’s studio is a space built to the measure and will of two artists with highly personal work—approached in different ways, yet somehow, tacitly or through lived experience, converging on analogous conclusions.

The process of creation—which so unsettled Marcel Duchamp for its theistic undertones—was on display in the studio in all its splendor. For a moment, all the stages of a single work stood before me (setting aside the intangible mental ones), as if they were frames of a film, each neatly adding meaning and a reason why to everything that filled my sight. Work was underway there continuously—of that there could be no doubt. A piece close to completion rested on the worktable, very near its sketch on paper. Just across the way, hanging on the wall, another piece, sister to the first, addressed us already in its definitive language.

Considering the origin of the word art, which I’ve been taught might come from Sanskrit and mean “to make”; then artisan would be “maker,” even if so much right and stature has been stripped from the term. In essence, Cristina and Tahiche are artisans—two artists with uncommon gifts for clay and cloth. A ceramist and a weaver who drift weightlessly through an atelier in which, at times, they simply vanish; leaving me free to nose around the airy corners, brimming with works and little slips of paper bearing literary notes, working titles, pieces from other catalogues, and half‑open books. Everything mixed together: scraps, pigments, warps, and clay.

Metaphor, as the artist’s creative function, digs into meanings and always considers the will of the one who uses it, beyond any figuration. It strikes the keys within us that bring to the surface an irrepressible desire to be anointed by all that it emanates and evokes. That’s why both of them, almost in unison, and with that private consensus of exchanged looks, said to me: “Folds and Parables”; and one had only to raise one’s eyes a little to see which belonged to whom.

Folds

According to Greek myth, three sister goddesses—venerated long before Zeus himself—devote themselves to spinning and weaving the fate of human beings from birth onward: the Moirai. The youngest of them, Clotho, is present at the moment of birth and carries the balls of wool from which life is spun—golden and white for moments of happiness and black for moments of pain. Lachesis, the middle sister, tends the distaff, winding that thread perfectly as a life unfolds, until the eldest, Atropos, cuts it with her golden scissors, marking an inexorable death.

Human life and the history of cloth are joined in an ancient artisan metaphor tied to our social being and to the psychological origin of clothing. Weaving is an act of nature, and of human nature—one of so many we reproduce from it on infinite scales. It’s no accident that textiles are intimately linked with woman—not by trade, as we might suppose (that image is rather cultural), but by nature. The feminine is a generator of life. The very myth of the feminine—through which, since the most primitive cultures, it has inspired fear or attraction—is closely related to woman’s natural capacity to weave life. Nature is a woman of immeasurable proportions and the same attributes.

Cristina’s Folds are textiles spun, like the myth, in a three‑movement tempo. They are fabrics that overflow their usefulness in search of their possible dimensions. Her preoccupations with the weave are the rhythm and the pattern through which the artist recognizes herself and reflects. A beat born from within spreads outward to the cadence of the machine. At the end of the road, the Folds will have been touched by memory, the way experiences are—bearing the imprint of how they once were. It should be said that memory in this case is an inevitable by‑product of the process and not the first intention.

The first movement takes us to the figure of the weaver, the spinner. The artist gathers herself in a world of actions that bring a pattern to light. Handwork, as the transformative principle, is the birth of later artistic intentions. Art rarely springs from chance or random piling‑up; it rests on the artist’s manual and mental capacities. So, does the abstract reasoning that exists between the artist and her work take possession of the fabric? Yes; and in that becoming—surprisingly aligned with the order of things—it provides a tempo like a checkerboard of what’s possible. The second movement unearths the secret verses of the spinning. The use—and not at all fortuitous abandonment—of the finished cloth produces a certain physical chaos that alters the form it had when it left the artist’s hands. Memory rises in the garment. Every wrinkle from a brush, every fold born of some alteration the hands work upon the warp, generates an experience and a pattern, making it the protagonist of an evocative space.

The weave—both backbone and scholarly weakness for Cristina—gathers and takes its strength in the folds. From the binding disorder within them, the basic idea of this work emerges clearly. The third movement produces the schemata that, like experiences, remain indelible and irrevocable in an instant with a certain witching air. Now the artist—having already been Clotho and Lachesis to her own work—is the one who cuts the thread. Not to leave it dead in the halting, mute language of an object‑concept’s disorder, but to give it life again—a second chance.

In its “new life,” the textile fulfills a design charged with lyricism that it had no idea was written for it. Bound to a frame as the intelligible limit of its renewed essence, it becomes a canvas. It will carry the imprint of what it was—like a perspective, an image that remains from that memory we agreed was residual. From her nature, the artist spins and draws life anew, in folds—aware that these and those folds are the same, and that they were folds from the very beginning. The symmetry and sectional scheme that sprang from confronting the folds through digital manipulation now draw from the canvas presences that are intriguing, subtle, ethereal, and highly suggestive. The time has come: the weave confesses itself bare and open in an expanded space that contained everything; and its voice, at this moment, is a murmur of condition, time, and longing. Knowing that doing matters more than what has been done.

The artist’s making has embroidered a canvas then sculpted with pencil and brush. A vertiginous sheet of to‑and‑fro and of pleasures; the imprint of something that, perceptibly, occurred. The folds speak to us of life and sensations from the realm of the visual and the tactile. Artistic sense lies in the generative process of the works. Metaphor is the mirror they offer us of life. We cannot tear our gaze from the brightness of the peaks or from the darkness of the abysses of these folds without noticing the perennial nature of the natural world and the eternal feminine. Both carry life and movement in a pattern of balance. Folds bound to an unwritten rule, laden—like woman—with reflection and passion.

Parables

We stand before twenty‑eight subtle and constant instants of the mind—twenty‑eight figurations of the continuity and housing of thought, where what is represented are possible domestic architectures of the human imaginary. By means of a story—or rather, a scene—each makes reference to a word which, as is fitting, is not written. The scene gives meaning to the parable, but from it we receive only the first letter, engraved in its two forms (uppercase and lowercase), perhaps to remind us that what Is, Is in its beginning, in its context, and, if there is one, in its end, as the Tao teaches.

By their reliquary‑like size, they invite the observer’s physical approach and a head‑tilting game—up and down, left to right—in a kind of scrutiny. What first comes to mind when contemplating this chosen alphabet is the scenic, and at moments the theatrical: the characters’ postures, the arrangement and purpose of the props. Perhaps there might have been an offstage conversation, but they present themselves in the attitude of mute soliloquies, where the power of the scene speaks from static silence—or rather, from the frozen movement of the characters—through the number and gender of the set’s elements, and even through the rationale for the chosen instant, which owes nothing to chance. To seek a likeness, it would be like attending a handful of theatres, performances in a single act, without apparent movement, where we are told everything while nothing is said.

In Tahiche’s work, ceramics as an art abandons its rudimentary echo and its modern industrial stigma. From his notebooks—crafted almost like an apostolate—the alchemist knows the tempos and the signs of his trade. He knows and feels, by something more than obligation, the elements he has in hand to reveal what he carries within: the earth that, with water, forms clay; next, time—just enough for air to give consistency so it may be worked; then fire, to make all that stone; and the human breath that gives a message to the result. Four elements that model the metaphor of life, confirming that the schooling of our emotions undergoes a similar process.

As a constant in much of his personal work, the ceramics are deliberately left bare of color. White dominates the piece—not as part of a dream language nor as an armature for figuration, but as the exact patina in the search for clarity of the tale, and perhaps also because the ideas that arrive from our deepest imaginary have a vague, imprecise color that even shifts for each person. In any case it is an Apollonian white; Tahiche imprints it on the work not without a certain oracular air—an intimation of what might be lived.

We are dealing with interior spaces—a kind of dwelling, made with a deliberate approach to the architectural. It is no coincidence that something prompts us to associate, if only for a time, sculpture as an art with architecture. Hence we can sometimes establish a certain symbiosis of thought between architect and sculptor. Thus, just as for the architect Alberto Kalach the three‑dimensional springs from an elemental, ambient, and harmonious space for the person who must inhabit that broad, everyday, exterior realm; for Tahiche, this ensemble of appearances and content in a three‑dimensional structure generates his settings, which also proceed from the intimate toward the external. It is ideas and sensations that need to generate a legible space to coexist in our imaginary. This is key for the collection to attain the desired value of a dwelling—and, more specifically (within the illusionistic), of everyday habitations for ideas. We should remember that in much of Tahiche’s work the structure of concepts moves through the use and understanding of physical and mental spaces. The path—as a journey or mental passage—is implicit in our perception of the parables, whether by the virtual movement of the characters or by the feeling of a closed circuit. The yearning, vertigo, fury, rejection, or dreamlike weightlessness latent in the pieces are steeped in dwellings almost tangible, which nevertheless belong to the realm of our dreams, our perception, and our unconscious state.

The Parables by Tahiche are scenes brimming with allegory. They carry over into sculpture the pictorial values of planes and horizons, without the restrictions of the two‑dimensional. The eye can take in any angle. The artist acknowledges a taste for the classics—especially the Baroque’s illusionistic perspective present in groups of humans and/or animals, and in the constructions inherited from Baroque and Romantic painting. This brings to mind a line from Calinescu: “Modernity is a dwarf upon the shoulders of a giant” (tradition). In these very contemporary parables, the imaginary is traditional and timeless. The experience—at times bizarre—recalls a Goya laden with rending details, playful and even ironically brutal in its understanding of the human and its finitude. The situations and customs of Louis David, and the clear allusions to the theatre—so broadly visual since the seventeenth century—serve the artist as the giant, though he later loosens that era’s mythological themes in search of a contemporary vocabulary.

Tahiche’s parables celebrate the rites by which we take on ideas. Ritually, we invent scenes to shelter our emotions. Perhaps that is why the sensations we draw from those dwellings feel both intimate and collective. Every age has believed that its art proposed the ultimate and perfect model for expressing, through image, what words alone never could. And yet universality has always been there, drinking from tradition and anticipating the conclusion that the soul of humankind and the soul of art are the same throughout history. And precisely for that reason, neither an image nor a parable is truly itself unless it draws its force and full meaning from the universality of its message.