TERESA CEBRIAN

 

Román de la Calle

Memory tends to become an excellent lever for future experiences, that’s why it should be so adequate to give shelter to our own memories//Yesterday I was able to establish, in very few seconds, that imagination can work as an appropriate spare wheel to creativity//Every time I do believe that with age, my aesthetic perceptions are allowed to be under protection with more regularity, strength and efficiency by imagination and memory//I dream to turn the standardized area of my bed into the available site to dry the skin of all those ghosts that pestered and pursue me more. And leaving them there, I try to change the bed forever//At times of pressing creativity tension, we try to make an effort, first to look into ourselves, then into the surrounding reality and finally to history, introspection, mimicry and rereading, are then, three key processes that come with us, to test the contemporary “inventio”//Why should it be we conceive memory as a usual memory deposit and not so much as an enviable warehouse of possible projects, adventures and recurrences? //Sometimes we forget, how relevant can be the presence of different materials in the artistic proposals. Actually they control widely, the rest of used record: the form adaptation, the behaviour of colours, the segmentation of the proper theme, the stress between time and space, and up to all, the effort that accompanies the job, they intervene, generally discretely like who doesn’t want to…//The therapy categories in the art context are caught from the historical arch of their possible functions: that’s to say following the dual classical expressions, “prodesse et delectare” “movere et docere”, “deprehendere et laxare animun”//Why do we forget the role of pain and solitude, of angst and void in the artistic creation? We relegate in the possible these strongest, efficient influences to the imaginary construction, at the most, we measure out to the maximum, maybe egoistically not to feel overwhelmed and exceeded //It take us so much to think what the personal interpretation of our works will not be, but one more of the random readings will come to superimpose to them. After all they are history and time the authentic banisters of the orthodox hermeneutics that will fix and establish officially in future.

With all my love. I have been building and editing them thinking of you.

A HUNDRED AND A FEW MORE WORDS

David Pérez

Words speak regardless of concrete lives and special wills: more than to say them, what they do is to tell us, offering us the possibility of being possible. In her making language transcends our living, that’s why to say about their disappearance doesn’t answer the decline of saying. They aren’t words that give up significance tiring up and shutting her senses: it is our reading and writing the world that distance us from words. Her remoteness –as near, however- suture our speech: a speaking without saying in which listening, absent, moves on without listening that she doesn’t hear.

PRAISE OF NOT TO BE, BEING

Maria Teresa Beguiristaín

There is nothing that kills more than life .Why then, so much modesty, so much fear to deal with death?. The arrival to life is an involuntary act, andnot always a happy one, however death can be voluntary and, therefore, and act of freedom and of liberation. To prepare oneself to die is consubstantial to living and to leave a trace is inherent to human desire. At them country houses of mu village, the dead were buried under the eaves of the house, as the houses always had a path that lead to a sacred place. The bodies, present, the way is the trip and the string which unites two states of the same self.

A STARTING OVER AGAIN

José Luis Pérez Pont

There is a constant the exaltation of  the physical achievements, at the same time that objects and forms capture permanently our attention. The words are now shown in an overabundance as humanity has ever known, communication technologies have widen the possibility of an increasing number of users can share theirs own- their words- it is maybe when it seams to lose part of her influence and drawn away by the force of images and its narrative efficiency.

Words can do all, sometimes they remain hung up some instants as part of a conversation and other times stay preserved to an unknown person that someday could give them other use. Words are as cobblestones with which we build tracks, they are the pieces with whom Teresa Cebrián has built her works, which personally means an a turning point in her artistic practice. Word as representation of voice, and the necessary autonomy of thought and its need in the public field. It is not impossible to exclude causes and effects of the global over the individual neither personal circumstances will not transform our relation with the world.

It is possible that our society has gone so far as to value for excess the meaning of the apprehensible and surely should rearrange our scale of values, adapt to a more accurate measure, more close to the surrounding reality. A big part of Teresa Cebrián production is based on the formal development of ideas and emotions where tactile and visual experience achieve an important function in the working process and the own experience of the spectator. A lot of other works, less known in Spain have been motivated by the relation with the social environment of the communities she visited in different countries with a valuable experiential load for the artist and for those participating in them.

Long ago that art ceased to be a static element, since in fact it has always been a tool to put in communication the persons beyond the common language. This ability to speak is not constrained by the forms employed in their representation or by the language of origin of its author her richness is to go beyond those barriers to penetrate inside natural courses of understanding as an instrument part to human condition.

We could say that Teresa Cebrián shows her own skin a surface rich in terms and valuable in symbolism, a skin ripped in strips with the resolution of a newborn, free from now on, of the weight of form to administer a source that flows by new courses.

Looking from a time capsule, wanting to gibe better words than the own ones, as a present, wishing to share emotions as a form to put the soul in the mouth, I found the words that Pedro Guerra created, the lyrics of the song ”Time and silence ”listened by the incomparable voice of Cesaria Evora:

A house in the sky

A garden in the sea

A skylark in your hair

A new beginning.

 

A wish of stars

A beat of a sparrow

An island in your bed

A sunset.

 

To be born in your laugh

To grow in your tears

To live on your back

To die in your arms.

 

Time and silence

Shouts and singing

Skies and kisses

Voice and sorrow.

7 TIMES 7

Álvaro de los Ángeles

After we pronounce words, after we made them audible, out of thinking what builds them to be said, words aren’t ours. They are said by us, defended by us, but they are already absent of authorship. The authorship is the first big mistake of human being. Without the authorship, however, not finished being, build us as humans. That’s our paradox. When artists build sculptures unsaid worlds but sculpted, treated as ideas that ought to have body to be read, and maybe pronounced aloud, we understand reality is being built.

We understand reality is being built, and that’s our paradox, since we lost the capability, to assume that the reality is given, is granted and transfer from one to another. Hence the illustrative compared with the illuminated. If light isn’t given already but must generate itself, the bonfire will be not only the lighting source but as well what gives us warmness. The smoke vanishing to the sky isn’t more powerful than the ones that which comes out of the cup and vanishes in the space of the room. The artist has vindicated his own room; the tea, then, was from red fruits, served cold and refreshed our words.

Our words followed the ascending rhythm of the stairs, of memories tied up to the floor of the terrace, from memories of the grandfather’s fern, to the sudden fresh air of the city. The suitcase is the symbol of travel, of the nomad’s dream and the hopeful return. The artist said that a nomad is the one who always returns. What happens to the one that always want to leave and, as Pessoa said “always remains, remains, remains?. To imagine the solitude’s shadow long as a narrow and high building. To remain in it as pain persists.

Pain persist in the hands and recalls seasons of travels and opposites getting closer and moving away without warning. To hold a tool, to sew a piece of latex. To lift a tray with a jug, they are symbols of a degenerative process. Art is a transitional period, the delimitation of doubt. Open exposures of oneself, to jump without net, rebuild oneself again ….. that’s the material works of art are made of.  Further more of the beauty they can contain and even further away of what can overflow in the theory of the interpretation of their concepts.

Her concepts have gone and returned to a territory that has already been discovered, colonized and deserted by phases, this is the end of an season in which words were said aloud or handwritten . There resounds a time that is already not between us, that’s why the echo: the sound already vanished, stays the rumour insisting not to leave. Words have become images of words or in sculptures that as well have become images, pretend to close the circle. The layer of synthetic skin embraces and tries to keep the space that absence left.

The absence also resounds in the interior of the agreed boxes. And the “Artist statement” raise the question of politics and art, and the social and historical context. The presentation began with “I’m an artist from the eighties”. Can one be from a time without treason? Can we claim a time in spite of it’s running us over us and it’s consequences. There are decades that are more present than others even when they chronologically are behind. Those are the years we awaken to critical thought and we settle down there, that’s our time. The rest goes with that construction.

That plot construction the artist requested has multiplied by the requested number itself. Seven times seven, as a prosaic curse or an inviolable sentence. Old frames, used, share a time that the words also make their own, but have not lived. ”When words disappear” we will lose memory but the present as well and the possibility of continuing to be. We will look at each other and we will write the dates of our best moments to create images that remind us that words, the same ones we said back then, have disappeared.

LETTER TO A FRIEND

Orlando Britto Jinorio.

My dear friend:

You asked me the other day, of whom were the works and if I knew the artist. I was slow to answer you, I told you yes, I smiled, I admit I was silent for some time swinging with memories, and when I was to speak about her, you had move away and I couldn’t see you. A little time later I saw you were speaking , at the other end of the room, with a  very attractive woman dressed in white. I’m sorry because instead of waiting for you I lost myself, actually I intentionally wanted to get lost. Abstracted by my thoughts in that space of “the lost words”.

I don’t want to lose the opportunity  to tell you that I, do not only know the artist Teresa. Teresa Cebrián, that’s her name but I share very beautiful memories and experiences, hours of work, always enriched at her side. Conversations with an artist and a indispensable person that has lived and lives life intensely. I speak about a valencian artist of universal dimension that has pulsed during decades between her birth place and her continuous meeting points, her long stays in multiple, cultural and international geographies.

An artist that has pulsed and pulses equally between silence and reclusion. A personal negotiation always exemplar and direct, clear and transparent, looking directly into your eyes as she looked and looks at life. An intellectual, independent, with the wisdom of so many lived experiences and so many assimilated readings, she control in her speaking and wise dialectic the times as an excellent composer. She distributes with masterly naturalness the spaces of humour and seriousness in her conversations. Nothing is unfounded in her speak as in her work. She has that gift of the gab to multiply the senses of words, so to listen to her means an exercise of needed attention, so other many possible meanings do not escape us. To her intense brushstrokes of concepts followed by beautiful glazes of pauses, silences, laughs and guessed smiles …. A music symphony of emotions and truths, as well in the phone space, where time stops to give way to emotions.

Teresa is a solid friend of her friends, that leaves us-I have to recognize it-  in visible evidence since we never finish to correspond with the same generosity that she takes care of us and keeps an eye on us. Her phone calls and mails are always a sweet worry: How are our lives going, work, family, and your wife and the children? You cannot have an idea of how grateful I am.

I’ve shared with Teresa in our spaces of rest and amusement after long days of work, my most revolutionary and neorealist dreams. A strange kind of adolescent desire with post Mexican way avoided in the uninhibited of gin-tonics between Cantabria, and Fuerteventura Island and in so many spaces of imagination. Crazy dreams where I saw myself coming inside cabarets on a horseback while people drank and danced. Drinks and laughs shared with Teresa while we danced salsa in a bar of Puerto del Rosario.  Every time we remember it, we cannot stop laughing. It is the capability of enjoying, recall and live again later the small moments of happiness. From that surreal moment in which we laughed so much my name was transformed already and forever for Teresa as Pancho, the new post revolutionary man (what a coincidence! when my son was small I invented every night, to put him to sleep, a story of Pancho adventures a canary dog taken to the Iberian Peninsula. A very simple projection! Will you say my dear friend!. It is the freedom of sharing and dreaming with children and also with adult people, why not?)

Well then, from that moment a very soft voice, slow and sweet, the one by phone who says and asks ”It’s me Teresa, how are you Pancho?”. A voice that always comforts me, phonemes that become words, a voice of friendship and fondness.

You cannot imagine how Teresa laughed when I dared finally to tell her that since two years ago I’m learning horse riding with my small daughter. At my age! She couldn’t stop laughing and I know why, surely she was watching my entrance on horseback to those cabarets of my imagination. I laugh as well writing you these words.

To speak to you about Teresa Cebrián my dear friend is to speak about an artist with capital letters, that has been and is respected by the whole of her work, by her coherence and an enormous conceptual and formal quality, and up to all because in her, word have their value and sense most beautiful: it’s always word and significance, an indissoluble combination. In her work and living space one doesn’t talk  for the sake of it, nothing is left to a free will of a lost meaning. The things said have a why or at least open numerous question marks of significance and it is in that dialectical territory we found ourselves frontally with the solidity and coherence of her speech and vital attitude. Teresa is one of those persons so sweet that she shocks and gives some respect and distance to men. I think you understand me, and that, makes her obviously as well enormously attractive.

This project that she present now under the title   ”… when words disappear “ and that we could more intimately visit together, it’s a personal and artistic statement on the loss of significance of words . A loss that happens not only on the globalized world of the media, in new strategies and technologies of communication, in that fragmented communication of the SMS or worse even of chats, where sentences are put one before another, and dialog becomes a strange  sort of convergence with divergence. But this loss of semantic value has arrived as well into our lives as in the own contemporary art.

Teresa told me that in the working process of this exhibition, how her painful hands in a ritual nearly exorcising  and ended up cutting, to dissect words, that already amputated and teared from her original value could in their combination De-re provide a context become in different meta-significants, in other different spaces or states of significance, to turn language into an unrecognizable reality in a communication space already between question marks ……faced with this void , faced with this vertigo . Where to place truth?  Where to place justice and honesty? What happened to language? and to art? It isn’t difficult to understand that all this that Teresa brings us up can be applied equally to social relations and politics.

Well I have to leave you now, my dear friend, only to say that I would like to go back together and visit this exhibition with you, in solitude and everyday calmness. In silence in front of every work of Teresa and later we can comment, if you like it, in a nearby terrace. The terrace is named WORDS, yes it’s there written in the awning, with capital letters and there will be waiting for us Teresa.

A strong and warm embrace.

Orlando.