Some Words
Elena Alonso described to me the appearance of her most recent work as resembling that which bones, knucklebones, stones, sticks, shells and other variegated objects cast at random by fortune-tellers offer up to be read. According to this type of primitive practice, the casual form adopted by the ensemble after the throw configures a sort of cryptic writing that the initiate interprets for the community, revealing aspects of what lies hidden, the cause of misfortunes, what is to come and one's fortune, the face that destiny will present… But what design do these recent drawings by the artist augur? What do they tell us about what we do not know, what do they reveal or stage? Well, in principle it is quite difficult to imagine that these images, so carefully constructed and composed, executed with delicacy to the edge of the intractable, betray anything more than a sort of complacency in uncertainty. Perhaps that alone suffices to explain them: that in their refined, exquisite rigidity, what they repress with their paralysis is precisely what is made evident: the staging of a world as static as it is ecstatic. And it is that the paralyzing perfection of a plan carried out without waste or rectifications, as Elena Alonso proposes, is, to put it plainly, simply chilling. There are no burrs, nor soundings, nor refutation in the certain path that the artist undertakes from the moment she stands before the paper until she considers the work finished. It is a unique case in our day, as far as I know, that excludes every type of instrumental variant of drawing in order to construct her images, even the most ambitious and complex, as closed and entire units from the beginning, without mediating rectifying processes. Pittore senza errori, Vasari said of the stylistic perfection of Andrea del Sarto. Drawings without error, in Elena's case, without trial or fault, without the necessity of fitting one form into another (in the support itself, for example, or in the plane of representation), nor the stirring of lines following different paths that the Venetian model of the disegno esterno would propose from the sixteenth century in contrast to the clear line of their Florentine colleagues, eminently linked to the Idea.\n\nIt is obvious to point out the profoundly Apollonian character in the work of this artist, whom one could even imagine as the most merciless pursuer of the line of shadow, armed with her drawing instruments: styluses and surgical scalpels implacably separating the visible from the mental, the possible from the ideal, the invisible from the unreal... Stalking each one of her compositions, governed by measure and order, everything measured and controlled, everywhere balancing each step and each appearance of a form with the rest, until at last, and with very few syntactic elements brought into play (although in this exhibition we will encounter some of her most complex drawings from the formal point of view), in an almost empty space that perfect harmony of objects launched into the air is sustained. In the sky, too, has been seen since antiquity the written destiny of men. But such a voice crystallized in the hands of Elena Alonso acquires more the sense of a pentagram, a sort of notational system where the spectator must read a perfect music, as the Platonists dreamed that the spheres gave off.\n\nThe recent series she presents here insist upon the conceptual support of drawing: what she offers us are, once again, abstract ideas in images, impenetrable and untranslatable, and at the same time delicate and of subtle sensuality, yes, but clearly of a mental nature. Her work resolutely confronts many of the commonplaces that in our present day associate by inertia the making of drawing: first of all, to processes (hers, I insist, is more than any other from the beginning a finished work); then, to the formula of a discipline based on concepts-language (the bewilderment to which following this trail in her case leads is phenomenal); and lastly, to the precariousness of means (when only intarsia and the inlay of semi-precious stones could compare to the sophisticated finish of these pieces of hers).\n\nWithout doubt, the Egyptian air of her most recent images also depends on this. The radical flattening onto the plane of the picture of the heterogeneous elements that appear in these drawings, as well as their distribution rigidly subjected to structural grids—which often are not disguised, but rather enter to configure the compositions in a prominent position—oblige the whole to its reticular distribution, on a flat ground, without superimpositions that announce perspective, and under the empire of codification. The result appears as flattened and spattered (signs, lines and segments, geometric figures, stains and pseudo-three-dimensional bodies) with corporeality very superficially alluded to, in the manner of bas-reliefs, distributed in a symmetrical and static, even forced and rigid manner.\n\nBut beyond the formal plane, whose mortifying figure we could embody in that disconcerting mummified triangle, wrapped in bandages that repeat and preserve it, we perceive in the new works of Elena Alonso the annulment of the temporal dimension that, according to Mario Perniola, characterizes the Egyptian character of certain contemporary art: "hence the impression of enigmatic synchronism and almost fulfillment of time that Egyptian productions inspire." For the Italian philosopher, in such characterization it is not only a matter of the contraction of the past, "but of the enigmatic joint presence of past and present, which at once excludes the possibility of expressing the lived moment and of going back to an arché, to a beginning, to an origin."\n\nAnd indeed, the writing without error of Elena Alonso does not refer to any original source: to what language could we translate these drawings suspended in time, in the air, on a pentagram half invisible that is at once figure and ground? As in so many of her previous series, she seems to construct a complex and inaccessible system to register, order, classify and archive the given, without scorning irony and the absurd, but with enormous seriousness in the end. All that disposition and its meticulous formal implementation is more proper to the index, to a certain cataloguing, than to the expansion of writing proper. But, careful, let us not forget that even indices where the ulterior contents of works (what has already been said) are announced succinctly, systematically ordered, form a literary genre, with its specific norms and formulas, with its maniera... "The inventory—to continue to the end with Perniola—is, therefore, connected with a conceptual and organizational activity that cuts, according to unprecedented perspectives, the past. It is, therefore, an approach that is at the antipodes of the static notarial custody of tradition. The completeness of time does not entail at all the registration and homologation of the universe, but the contrary, it predisposes it to an unlimited number of cataloguings." So be it, then, and may Elena continue attempting it in cycles and series of astonishing perfection.\n\nÓscar Alonso Molina\nfrom February 13 to March 30, 2014