FANTASTIC NATURE
Paulina Miguel by María Carolina Baulo
“Repetition does not imply doing the same thing. It is the litany of persistence that becomes meaningful when we discover the subtle difference between one image and another, between one action and another. Delicate distance, since exact reproduction is never possible”.
Andrea Giunta, When does contemporary art begin? (2014)
Many times it happens that when we look at the production of an artist in retrospect, we come across works that throughout her life, even when going through the most diverse circumstances and emotions and receiving the impact of stimuli from various sources, while building a new person in each act of reflection, they still hold a persistent interest that is re-signifies constantly. And that time seems to go through in the works under a different chronology in that action of sustaining the search, the theme, the engine that crushes and insists on being revisited a thousand times in each stroke.
Paulina Miguel's work is an ode to nature. Painting and drawing are her plastic resources and the large scale is her most precious format. It is by observing all her work that it is difficult to establish watertight compartments because each series has minimal subtleties with respect to the others, which causes everything to have a great family resemblance, a solvent coherence and, especially, a registered trademark that is the aesthetic imprint of the artist. But perhaps this detail is a double-edged sword if Paulina decides to stay in a space of comfort where the repetition of the motifs, themes and structures that create the works, multiplies dangerously, walking the fine line between a motivation that is updated in the practice and a known performance that does not enable the leap towards change, towards the experimentation of the uncertain. I strongly believe that the one who resists in a speech, a motivation that does not need to be diverted or unmotivated, needs to develop techniques, forms, disruptive skills to tell the same thing in a different way. Then it is not the same anymore.
Acrylics, oils, drawings in graphite and pencils, pastels, collages create the material universe that allows Paulina - sometimes from photographic records and sometimes appealing to the memory where the image of nature is printed - to explore the magnificence of the natural environment and ram it with an overdose of magical and dramatic realism where, although there is an exquisite work of illustration and knowledge of the tools, the landscapes can reach quasi-Pop extremes where the explosion of color takes center stage. Organic and abundant, the work shows in the details the artist's interest in putting the line in dialogue with the stain, the lights and the shadows, the real and the imagined. Dreamlike spaces that have been developed in each series for decades, from Huellas Textuales (Textual Marks, 2002), Río bajo el Río (River under the River, 2004), Ser Tierra (Be Earth, 2011) and Nocturnos (Nocturnal, 2011), Incendios (Fires, 2012), Nevada (Snowfall, 2014), Microclima (Microclimate, 2016), Paisaje Interior (Interior Landscape, 2020), Escenarios Naturales (Natural Scenarios, 2020-2021) or large-format drawings on canvas, worked in recent times, are just some of the records that show a reigning passion that, even today, persists in force in her insatiable observance of nature. Special mention should be made about works such as the Erotica (Erotic, 2006) or the Paisajes Urbanos (Urban Landscapes, 2015) series, a kind of creative "slip" that does not stray far from the source because urbanity is treated as another natural setting and nothing to say about the most visceral and genuine nature of eroticism.
It is interesting to focus on the works of recent times, where that palette of an invasive and “all-powerful” presence that seeks to balance itself in simple and recognizable forms so as not to overwhelm the viewer in an explosion of color but to integrate him into the work, begins to be silenced and the background is neutralized in white allowing the story to stand out in the foreground without competition or contrast between figures and background. Abstract echoes that are repeated everywhere and alert the observer against any possibility of association of the work with reality. Facing Paulina Miguel´s, we are clearly immersed in a parallel but plausible world, because we all think we know what we see but finally, it is a great gadget. Like art itself, and it is there, I believe, where all the wonder of it lies, in the magic of making us believe the impossible.
LIC. MARÍA CAROLINA BAULO. AUGUST 2021