“All that is eternal must be profound”
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its fountains! (…) Through the gray of the early morning—among the trellised shadows of the forest at noonday—and in the silence of my library at night—she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her—not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream; not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being; not as a thing to admire, but to analyze; not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation.1
Then, referring to Ligeia, another main character in his works, Poe affirms: ” It was the radiance of an opium-dream—an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered vision about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. ”2 Poe’s fervent imagination admired Ligeia’s beauty as if “ it was the radiance of an opium-dream—an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered vision about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. ”3
Just like Edgar Allan Poe’s, works by many other artists within the cultural or artistic worlds have entirely focused on the feminine. During centuries the woman’s image has been continuously represented, idealized and sublimated. According to Ernesto Sábato, “art connects with the feminine side”, “art is precisely the creation of the human spirit closest to the feminine, as in art there has not occurred a division between the different elements of reality: the concrete and the abstract, the irrational and the rational remain undistinguished.”4
In her creations, Marta Blasco goes further, and transports us into the territory of our own human solitude. In her production, a cool light seems to gird our lives as if it was a dark gorge leading to hell; in other words, to Pluto’s underworld, where God Hades tests the Courage of our spirits. And that’s because our heritage is not only found on the earth’s surface but also in its gloomy bowels. Our body is a joyful stem which rises up towards solar communication, irradiating through the shadows. It seems to be intending to transmit us that, most of the times, we are funambulists trying to maintain a difficult equilibrium over the abyss. Also, we are dreamers, birds without wings who seek to fly up over our own impediments and put a heavenly yearning upon our naked bodies. Our body is, therefore, a catapult towards the infinite, a sign drawn on the “highness” of the world- a nude, a levitating body, a thought reposing on a hand, and a dark shrouding shadow which, with a great subtleness, gives way to light. A silent dialogue which Marta initiates with serene simplicity and perfection. But, for Marta, what is the meaning of the pneuma that surrounds the represented body?
It is, perhaps, a very particular diegesis about space and time; a unique presence of a remoteness, notwithstanding its proximity. Making things closer to ourselves or approaching them to others, is an impulse as passionate as it is intending to overtake the unrepeatable, in any circumstance, by means of its reproduction. What is curious enough is that the necessity of taking possession of the object, both in the most immediate immediateness and in the image or in the copy, gains, day by day, an unimpeachable validity. Singularity, duration, fugacity and repetition are closely involved in these frequencies. Unwrapping the object and grinding its aura is the signature of a perception whose sense has grown so much that, even through repetition, gains importance over the unrepeatable. It is like a “flash” from deep inside, a way of observing time fragments in a continuous movement, an Egonic concept of definition of the spiritual being released from its material body. Thus, Marta Blasco, inclined towards the creation of an image which challenges our sense and helps the observers to understand it, liberating them from the constrains of linear thinking.
It is not a question of entertaining but of liberating the observer. Her art is not one which considers nature as a model to be followed, but a space to transform. Reality is not only what we see but what emerges from our deepest inner selves, and it is known as Fantastic Realism. In this particular case, it lays hidden behind the artist’s rational and Cartesian perception of the world.
In “Papeles rotos” a feminine portrait is articulated around two complementary dimensions, mezzotint engraving technique and animation. Once the image is concluded, it is then fragmented to create new compositions. As if the artist, apart from intending to print the continuous movement of the same image, would be trying to focus on a middle stage between consciousness and unconsciousness, reality and imagination; that is to say, a state of semi-consciousness whose genesis is found in its relationship with the aesthetics of the sublime.
Gaston Bachelard wondered: “Is it not the dream a testimony of the lost being, a getting lost being, a being fleeing from our own being; even if we can repeat it, finding it again in its strange transformation?” Following Bachelar’s line, his setting a new emphasis on matter and declaring that “matter is the unconsciousness of form” 5 suggest us that inquiring into the constructed images we have to bring them back to their own material substance. It is here that we find another starting point in Marta Blasco’s works.
The animation “Papeles rotos “ breaks the mould, both concerning conception and performance. It resembles the technique for producing animations using clippings- a cutout animation made from the different fragmented compositions she manipulates, manually composes and photographs, in order to finally reconstruct the image again. The precarious character of the representation leads us to references like Norman McLaren, a pioneer in animation; and more specifically to his short animation movie “A Chairy Tale” (1957), in which he gives life to a chair, thus questioning the relationship between matter and man.
If we analyze both techniques confronted, we observe that they complement each other. Marta Blasco uses her creative fiction to establish, through the optical effect of the interstices, a dialogue which enriches and completes the conceptual reading of her work.
There have been a great number of artistic expressions which prove that mankind has been trying to represent the illusion of movement, as in cave painting, Turkish, Egyptian or Greek Art and later on, regarding Chinese shadow plays. However, it was in 1640 when Athanasius Kircher invented the magic lantern shows, where he projected the different stages of a movement using engravings on glass plates he changed mechanically. Years later, in 1824, Peter Mark Roget discovered the “Persistence of Vision Principle”, the basis of all projected images we know nowadays. It proved that the human eye retains an image during the time necessary to be substituted by another one, and thus successively until a 360º complete movement is made.
Obviously, all these concepts and discoveries had been improved until the birth of cinema in 1895. However, animation cinema was first produced in 1905 when Segundo de Chomón made “L’Hotel Elettrico”; although official history attributes the discovery to Stuart Blackton.
On the other hand, as experts on this field, we know that the artist who took a leading role, using a great deal of animation effects in his works, was George Méliès. Every work of this French magician of genius takes shape in an alternative reality, more expansive and hypnotic. What for others means an eccentricity of the imagination, in this director’s universe, however, each still is the rigorous application of free imagination, an alchemic process in which reality mutates to become something better, more exalted and intense.
Marta Blasco’s “Papeles rotos” introduces us wholly into Méliès’s subject matters by providing her work with a hypnotic sense, the final outcome of animation and real image. She assembles an apparently chaotic puzzle; in fact, ordered following her own criteria and faithfully playing with effects which remind us of Roget’s postulations. And also she fragments, disarms, tears apart, and finally recomposes the view of the image; may be, to be able to attain its most profound meaning.
Her mezzotint engravings are themselves a seeking journey, a process of experimentation, an exploration of the infinite possibilities of the surrounding reality. Blasco divides, multiplies, reunites and successfully builds up. There is a message concealed in her work, a clue to decipher the codes of her own world constructed of tremors and bits, which, in fact, conform to contemporary actuality.
Just like Edgar Allan Poe’s, works by many other artists within the cultural or artistic worlds have entirely focused on the feminine. During centuries the woman’s image has been continuously represented, idealized and sublimated. According to Ernesto Sábato, “art connects with the feminine side”, “art is precisely the creation of the human spirit closest to the feminine, as in art there has not occurred a division between the different elements of reality: the concrete and the abstract, the irrational and the rational remain undistinguished.”4
In her creations, Marta Blasco goes further, and transports us into the territory of our own human solitude. In her production, a cool light seems to gird our lives as if it was a dark gorge leading to hell; in other words, to Pluto’s underworld, where God Hades tests the Courage of our spirits. And that’s because our heritage is not only found on the earth’s surface but also in its gloomy bowels. Our body is a joyful stem which rises up towards solar communication, irradiating through the shadows. It seems to be intending to transmit us that, most of the times, we are funambulists trying to maintain a difficult equilibrium over the abyss. Also, we are dreamers, birds without wings who seek to fly up over our own impediments and put a heavenly yearning upon our naked bodies. Our body is, therefore, a catapult towards the infinite, a sign drawn on the “highness” of the world- a nude, a levitating body, a thought reposing on a hand, and a dark shrouding shadow which, with a great subtleness, gives way to light. A silent dialogue which Marta initiates with serene simplicity and perfection. But, for Marta, what is the meaning of the pneuma that surrounds the represented body?
It is, perhaps, a very particular diegesis about space and time; a unique presence of a remoteness, notwithstanding its proximity. Making things closer to ourselves or approaching them to others, is an impulse as passionate as it is intending to overtake the unrepeatable, in any circumstance, by means of its reproduction. What is curious enough is that the necessity of taking possession of the object, both in the most immediate immediateness and in the image or in the copy, gains, day by day, an unimpeachable validity. Singularity, duration, fugacity and repetition are closely involved in these frequencies. Unwrapping the object and grinding its aura is the signature of a perception whose sense has grown so much that, even through repetition, gains importance over the unrepeatable. It is like a “flash” from deep inside, a way of observing time fragments in a continuous movement, an Egonic concept of definition of the spiritual being released from its material body. Thus, Marta Blasco, inclined towards the creation of an image which challenges our sense and helps the observers to understand it, liberating them from the constrains of linear thinking.
It is not a question of entertaining but of liberating the observer. Her art is not one which considers nature as a model to be followed, but a space to transform. Reality is not only what we see but what emerges from our deepest inner selves, and it is known as Fantastic Realism. In this particular case, it lays hidden behind the artist’s rational and Cartesian perception of the world.
In “Papeles rotos” a feminine portrait is articulated around two complementary dimensions, mezzotint engraving technique and animation. Once the image is concluded, it is then fragmented to create new compositions. As if the artist, apart from intending to print the continuous movement of the same image, would be trying to focus on a middle stage between consciousness and unconsciousness, reality and imagination; that is to say, a state of semi-consciousness whose genesis is found in its relationship with the aesthetics of the sublime.
Gaston Bachelard wondered: “Is it not the dream a testimony of the lost being, a getting lost being, a being fleeing from our own being; even if we can repeat it, finding it again in its strange transformation?” Following Bachelar’s line, his setting a new emphasis on matter and declaring that “matter is the unconsciousness of form” 5 suggest us that inquiring into the constructed images we have to bring them back to their own material substance. It is here that we find another starting point in Marta Blasco’s works.
The animation “Papeles rotos “ breaks the mould, both concerning conception and performance. It resembles the technique for producing animations using clippings- a cutout animation made from the different fragmented compositions she manipulates, manually composes and photographs, in order to finally reconstruct the image again. The precarious character of the representation leads us to references like Norman McLaren, a pioneer in animation; and more specifically to his short animation movie “A Chairy Tale” (1957), in which he gives life to a chair, thus questioning the relationship between matter and man.
If we analyze both techniques confronted, we observe that they complement each other. Marta Blasco uses her creative fiction to establish, through the optical effect of the interstices, a dialogue which enriches and completes the conceptual reading of her work.
There have been a great number of artistic expressions which prove that mankind has been trying to represent the illusion of movement, as in cave painting, Turkish, Egyptian or Greek Art and later on, regarding Chinese shadow plays. However, it was in 1640 when Athanasius Kircher invented the magic lantern shows, where he projected the different stages of a movement using engravings on glass plates he changed mechanically. Years later, in 1824, Peter Mark Roget discovered the “Persistence of Vision Principle”, the basis of all projected images we know nowadays. It proved that the human eye retains an image during the time necessary to be substituted by another one, and thus successively until a 360º complete movement is made.
Obviously, all these concepts and discoveries had been improved until the birth of cinema in 1895. However, animation cinema was first produced in 1905 when Segundo de Chomón made “L’Hotel Elettrico”; although official history attributes the discovery to Stuart Blackton.
On the other hand, as experts on this field, we know that the artist who took a leading role, using a great deal of animation effects in his works, was George Méliès. Every work of this French magician of genius takes shape in an alternative reality, more expansive and hypnotic. What for others means an eccentricity of the imagination, in this director’s universe, however, each still is the rigorous application of free imagination, an alchemic process in which reality mutates to become something better, more exalted and intense.
Marta Blasco’s “Papeles rotos” introduces us wholly into Méliès’s subject matters by providing her work with a hypnotic sense, the final outcome of animation and real image. She assembles an apparently chaotic puzzle; in fact, ordered following her own criteria and faithfully playing with effects which remind us of Roget’s postulations. And also she fragments, disarms, tears apart, and finally recomposes the view of the image; may be, to be able to attain its most profound meaning.
Her mezzotint engravings are themselves a seeking journey, a process of experimentation, an exploration of the infinite possibilities of the surrounding reality. Blasco divides, multiplies, reunites and successfully builds up. There is a message concealed in her work, a clue to decipher the codes of her own world constructed of tremors and bits, which, in fact, conform to contemporary actuality.
1 Edgar Allan Poe. Berenice, 1835
2 Edgar Allan Poe. Ligeia, 1838
3 Edgar Allan Poe. Ligeia, 1838
4 Translated from a quotation: Ernesto Sábato. Sobre la metafísica del sexo, 1953. Universidad de las Américas, Puebla (México)
5 Gaston Bachelard. Air and Dreams, 1943