ART
The first Spanish artist to occupy the main exhibition space at the Contemporary Art Centre in Malaga, Victoria Civera takes us on an intimate journey through her emotions and femininity
01.06.10 - 11:11 -
Civera. ‘Saliendo del paisaje’ (Leaving the landscape). Álvaro Cabrera
May 28th saw yet another opening at the Contemporary Art Centre in Malaga. The exhibition ‘Atando el Cielo’ features artist Victoria Civera’s painting over the last decade. On display is a selection of works in different formats and techniques, including several shown for the first time. In her painting, Victoria Civera opens up a highly personal, feminine space in the art world as she explores what it is like to be a woman. She pours her feelings, emotions and experience into her works, which embrace both the abstract and the figurative, filling them with great expressive quality and powerful emotional tension.
Victoria Civera’s paintings reflect the artist herself, her world. Her moods are easy to recognise in these works, which are drenched in melancholy, sensuality, mixed feelings and great expressiveness, for the Valencian artist is keen to explore the many facets of the female figure. This is an apparently simple universe in which life becomes confused with dream, and the abstract and the figurative become mixed, explicitly and harmoniously.
The 47 paintings in ‘Atando el cielo’ trace the development of Civera’s painting over the last decade, and includes several works produced especially for the show.
Though Victoria Civera has also devoted considerable time and energy to sculpture and to creating installations from everyday objects, it is in painting that she finds a constant medium in which to express her feelings and experiences. As she herself has pointed out: “I have always had fears, and I would like to be radically sequential and neutral when it comes to presenting and editing my work, but I feel that, if I was any other way, I would kill an important part of my personality. I am marked by that ambiguity and that fragility of media”.
The woman that Victoria Civera portrays in her work is different in every painting. In some pieces, she is an object of desire (Túnel eterno, 2001), whilst in others she is lonely or sad (Perdida, 2008). However, she is always represented as a brave, powerful being, determined and defiant, always ready to go beyond the established bounds, as she does in Saliendo del paisaje, 2000.
Victoria Civera (Port de Sagunt, Valencia,1955) studied at the San Carlos Art School in Valencia, where she experimented with photography, photomontage and happening. In the late-1970s, she moved to Santander and began to produce large, neo-Expressionist paintings, whilst the following decade found her continuing to work along figurative lines, now in New York, where her art underwent important changes. She gradually imbued her work with more intimate content, and to use new materials, such as plaster, cotton, linen, silk, velvet and different objects. Later, in the 1990s, whilst never losing her passion for painting, she also began to explore the world of sculpture and installation. From now on, her work would always be fully figurative.
‘Atando el cielo’ features a selection of paintings in different formats that vindicate the roles of today’s women, both in society and in their intimacy. In many of them, Victoria Civera uses the circle, with its powerful evocative capacity. The circle denotes the origin and meaning of life and is a crucial symbol in her work, both conceptually and formally (Cataplaf, 2006; Madre Norte, 2009; Anda y pasa, 2006).
According to Fernando Francés, director of CAC Malaga and curator: “there is no speculation in Victoria Civera’s work, only honesty. There is no room for concession, only a constant quest for truth, undertaken with a passion for the adventure of life that is, in her case a way of feeling and of loving. CAC Malaga takes the spectator on a journey through this artist’s painting over the last decade, an exploration of her feminine spirit that reveals her as one of the most important artists on the international scene, though hers is a career marked by voluntary silences, discretion, rare rigour and deliberate distancing from the noise and theatricality of the art world”.
