“In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars.”
City That Does Not Sleep (1929) by Federico García Lorca
To come across these paintings is to hear the hooting of owls with piercing gazes; the climbing of gigantic spiders; the scraping of vipers on rotting wood, leaves and moss; the howling of beings with decaying faces and limbs; portraits of humans hidden from the light, with the deformities of those who did not receive the fortune of the sun. In short, a landscape of shadows. However, these apparitions of nightmarish beings are found with their nocturnal complement: couples desiring each other in the vertigo of the furtive; plants in the shape of genitals; animals, insects and specters to which the artist, despite their deformity, does not take away the ability to feel and feel, caress and caress.
This exhibition is as little programmatic as it is libidinal. It responds to Josefina Concha E.’s impulse to exploit her voracious relationship with painting, usually sublimated by her sculptural textiles, which she creates after having given flesh to enlarged quilts, layer by layer, by means of threads sewn by torrid machines. Machines that whip like turbines on a wooden floor in Santiago, an insistent and repetitive noise that can become a nightmare. Painting, then, becomes for Josefina an escape from this mechanical action, painting is a safe place, a place of confidence, of shelter and protection, even if it is a figurative expressionism that seems that the skin is detached from the models, it is still the familiar space where the artist returns, activating sight before any other sense.
Therefore, Excursiones nocturnas invites us to a wasteland of natural and fantastic creatures, represented in small paintings and volumetric textiles attached to structures as if they were going to take flight at any moment. Works that are hidden behind waning and waxing moons, since they are never exposed to total clarity, they need enough brightness to allow us to look at them from our dry landscape, to observe that tremulous and humid region, more humid than the swampy city of Buenos Aires.
Since it is fundamental to understand the importance of escaping from our everyday life, to contemplate this zoo of monsters and lovers, is to compromise so that the turbines of everyday life do not end up exhausting us. To get away from the mundane noise is something to which all of us who dedicate ourselves to art aspire and, unfortunately, we are generally required to vociferate, as if the burning cities were not enough. “Life is not a dream, alert! alert! alert! alert!” wrote García Lorca.
I like to think that a snake can be the analogy of the pictorial discipline for the artist. Thus, some vipers come out of the head of a sleeping man, it is that city -at last- of sleep, one where the reptile spreads out all over the landscape chatting with its animal and human companions convincing them to catch us. That snake that is painting itself has no end, a crawling beast that all the time explores original districts, it is looking for new things and, in those alleys that open up, it gets tangled, knotting itself, staying for a while in that problem of color, brushstroke, style, school. Then you get bored, you hate the conventions but, as the same poem already quoted says: “he who fears death will carry it on his shoulders”, within the failures, disappointment must be the most terrible of them. In short, if this is the way to understand Josefina’s painting, I could not agree more.
Josefina Concha E. proposes us in this exhibition to live painting as an escape to the cruel reality we live. This thanks, first and to a great extent, to these two-dimensional works and, later, by affective company, by her weavings, so all these works inhabit a city where the fantastic and the oneiric have escaped, which has slipped into the Buenos Aires capital that has been transformed this time, as on other occasions in its history, into a city without a sleep.
Finally, arriving at this wasteland of monsters and lovers was not because I was a more or less informed spectator of the artist’s subjective universe, her trajectory and her interests, but because this exhibition is a suggestive invitation for its viewers. And, before closing with a bland quote from Freudian psychoanalysis, which in a somewhat linear way understands death with desire as a double side of the same coin. No, I would like to go deeper into a fantastic personal universe, since it is not only the exceptional quality of these pieces that summons me to write and accompany, but the possibility of committing myself to an illusion. Before lowering the blinds of complete fantasy and entering the city without sleep, let’s let ourselves be enchanted for a moment by the possibility of walking with creatures tonight.
