A view over TIERRA
From love to horror, by Javier Rubio Nomblot
TIERRA is an unsettling mixture of love and horror in which the assault rifle, the atomic mushroom, the mass of worms, the skeleton, are transmuted into delicate compositions with porcelain flowers. Allegories of a loving -and redemptive- approach to horror -caused by man- that takes place in the feminine and even defines it.
Allegories also of a femininity inevitably linked to death as life provider; to a suffering instinctively clothed in beauty; to a meandering humidity and, of course, to its never inoffensive -nor exempt from apparent fragility and seductions- position in front of man... TIERRA is, therefore, a decisive chapter in the discourse of two artists who rehearse, in a disturbing exhibition, the identification and regeneration, through love -and fragility-, both of what the sexes project one onto the other and of what is abject by humanity over Earth.
The extremely fragile pieces by Ana + Betânia are situated in a particularly open position in relation to the vast field of post-feminism: the properties of ceramic and the way of understanding and handling it reinforce the fragile, transitory, elusive character of any approach to female condition.
The work of the portuguese duo provokes multiple readings. The direct appeal to technique, that mastery of the art of ceramics in its most artisan dimension (the one that underlies the classical decorative object as a product of an objective knowledge of the practice, evoked here with an unquestionable irony), enables it to be reborn, redeemed.
Decorative ceramics take on a new meaning, becoming politically updated and their connections with artisan work -that meticulous modeling of thousands of tiny petals and pistils - traditionally delegated to women, emerge with renewed spirit.
