Repetition and difference. The (automatic) painting of Alejandra Barreda.
In the surrealist invention of automatic writing, Maurice Blanchot finds a key to reading to, among other things, determine inspiration, lack of inspiration and that contradictory and productive passage that is at the beginning of literary creation, although it can extend to artistic creation, in general. He recognizes in automatic writing, “that method of ease, an always available and always effective instrument” that allows anyone to become a poet at any time. The poem that is constructed, passing from beings to beings, writing itself in each one and without anyone, expresses the initial poetic demand of giving back to the words “the key to his kingdom” to stop being in ordinary language the representation of something but the thing itself in the context of poetry.
Finally, automatic writing is, for the French thinker, the affirmation of that language without silence, an inexhaustible source, “an infinite murmur.” Not only is writing discussed in that essay by the author of The Literary Space: to exemplify the inexhaustible nature of inspiration, that proximity to the uninterrupted, he comments that Rilke could not stop writing nor could Van Gogh stop painting.
A line that follows another line, a color that comes after the other, is Alejandra Barreda’s compositional model. Repetition and difference, from frame to frame, to establish the conditions for the creative transformation of the categories. A palette controlled by use: there will never be two identical colors together and the separations, at a distance of six, begin the series once again. Those that seem to tend towards the extensive, the indeterminate of the form. One brushstroke after another to cover the surface of the fabric that joins the other piece, which expand and melt towards the wall.
An automatic painting, but made by the hand of a single artist. However, Barreda’s gesture could be read in the sense of inexhaustible character, of uninterrupted movement from one undulation to another, an unlimited tide of controlled chance. “You will have all the colors,” seems to have been the promise. However, the pact goes beyond quantity: it is color as everything and as its origin. It is the very possibility of color for the turns that will form that incalculable, immense language, unlimited in combinations, that is made in each vibrant wave.
The versions of a constant variation in Barreda’s works that, in the light of automatic writing, also refer to what is entertaining in that gesture. Some play, a bit of fortune, contingency, even whim, to free yourself from some of the ways of the figurative and offer yourself, surrender, to the movement that is pure passion. In any case, the curves and waves that Barreda describes with his full and iridescent colors will be the ribbons of a fabric, the reverberation and irradiation of a sound intensity, the reflection, sunshine and refraction of the desire that slips away.
It is that Equality of frequency, the harmony between the planes that will be looked at, that reveals the demand of its author. That of giving a repertoire of possible compositions, slight alternations and small innovations, with the certainty that the search is for that which cannot be searched. “The testing of what is not tested,” Blanchot will write, to conclude that the poetry of automatic writing puts us in contact with the immediate. However, the immediate is not what is close in terms of what we have at hand, but rather what moves us. Make possible for painting what the French poet René Char, signatory of the Second Manifesto, understood for the poem: The poem is the love realized from desire that remains desire.
Laura Isola, July 2022
