Some Words
Stories of Weavers
by Estrella de Diego
The gaze settles upon the pictorial surface and for an instant has the impression of standing before a strange collage of superimposed fabrics, later cut out—an angle, a piece, a strip, a rescued pattern, a texture, a gesture… The peculiar juggling of scraps creates a powerful sensation of textiles, a sort of unexpected tapestry that distances itself, but only in appearance, from the drawings of some years ago, when the dialogues between figurative glimpses and strange alphabets by Pepa Prieto incited memory to run toward Henri Michaux, visual poems, drawn writings, which at every step sent us back to a certain unstoppable automatism, that of the unconscious minds crowding indecisive in every thought. These are the vestiges of those stories that Prieto camouflages behind the abstractions in her paintings, which have much of open windows and of memory—her memories that, as she explains, she realigns on the surface of the canvases so they may have new lives, new stories.
Memories too are composed of scraps and have much of collage, of narrative open to complicity. They emerge. This is the artist's requirement: she wants us as accomplices, ready to see beyond the abstract appearance and imagine the renewed forms as Henri Michaux demands. Prieto expects us to take up those aligned memories to recompose our own, for after all every memory is composed of superimpositions and montages, even filmic ones. But let no one be deceived because Pepa Prieto's work is anything but automatic, understood in the traditional manner. It seems above all part of the fabulous trap of Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou which is not a dream: it reproduces the structure of the dream with a montage without a crack of chance.
Similarly, Pepa Prieto's paintings reproduce a meticulous game of eventualities that are not so at all, among other things because in her proposals on top of the canvas she works from two antithetical materials—oil and acrylic—which do not allow her to know the result beforehand. There is no room for errors and if they slip in one must start from the beginning. Again. Such is the juggling: in the framework of a weave—and of a dream—the surfaces emerge surprising, even for the author. In these impeccable close-ups of the rich fabrics, those that show the care of the colors and forms that send us back to other forms, suddenly I hear the stories that weavers dream and tell as they weave, as the forms appear on the surface, as in the dream. Then the abstract sends us back to remembrance and the forms expand toward the invisible background.