Carolina Grau /Curator
Angela de la Cruz: Escombros
at Fundación Luís Seoane, Coruña, Spain (February to May 2015)
Angela de la Cruz. Escombros brings together 16 works made by Spanish artist Angela de la Cruz between the years 2009 and 2014, the first exhibition dedicated to the artist by an art centre in her hometown. Escombros takes its title from one of the works included in the show, Debris (2012), in which the artist refers to rubbish and to the waste afloat in the oceans that finally surfaces on the seashore. The theme is closely related to one of the leitmotifs in her oeuvre, natural disasters—to be precise, the dire consequences of the tsunami that devastated the coasts of Thailand in December 2004 and the impact that the images of the subsequent debris and wreckage had on her.
References to water, remains and refuse brought in by the sea, along with what is left after the disaster, are repeated constantly throughout the exhibition. Such is the case of Battered III (Mud) (2012), an aluminium picture in which we make out numerous dents, as if it had repeatedly crashed into a static mass, as occurs with the objects that the sea crashes against the rocks. It is also true of Wet (Blue)[2012], in which the presence of water, physically absent from the work, can be made out thanks to the mark it left on the lower part of the canvas. The works included in the show establish close relations with the architectural space, in this case thanks to the exclusive use of two colours, white and brown, in an allusion to light (an element very present in the Fundación Luís Seoane building) and to mud (the stagnant water that remains after the flood, after the disaster). Over the course of her career Angela de la Cruz has developed a specific language that enables her to give her paintings a sculptural quality, blurring the limits between painting and sculpture. Her oeuvre therefore manages to establish close connections between the physical characteristics of several of its constitutive elements, the use of colour as an essential part of that language, and a painstaking choice of titles for the works.
We see a stack of Hille chairs that have fallen on a cement surface. The chair has been a constant presence in the artist's work, as an element that symbolises the human being, both on account of its absence and for the way in which it suggests a domestic scale.
Debris
Stuck belongs to a group of site-specific works for exhibition spaces that are characterised by their excess mass and volume. In this case, Stuck is jammed in the frame of a door, neither able to enter nor exit, obstructing the entrance to the exhibition area.
We see a stack of Hille chairs that have fallen on a cement surface. The chair has been a constant presence in the artist's work, as an element that symbolises the human being, both on account of its absence and for the way in which it suggests a domestic scale.