(Part of the series La Catástrofe es amarilla (Catastrophe is Yellow)

“Carolina Saquel (Chile, 1970) is both a painter and a video artist who feels personally concerned with issues specific to painting. Invited to create works linked to those of Joan Miró, she was inspired by the Catalan painter’s reflection on the pictorial space and by the poetic quality of his paintings and their titles and in fact has borrowed from him the titles of her videos shown in Espai 13.

“In his paintings and in his drawings”, she remarks, “Miró presents us with a concept of the space in which the relationship between the figure and the background is structured in an indivisible arrangement. To a certain extent, the notions of surface and depth become equivalent. Miró rejected both the illusion of depth and perspective and creates a particular relationship between the various elements: there are no main or secondary elements, instead they are all of the same value in the pictorial plane. Miró’s work is linked in one way or another to Eastern traditions in philosophy and painting. Similarly, the notion of the ‘void’ is one of the elements that I think run through his oeuvre and which are also found in my work. Miró teaches us to look carefully at the everyday; he offers us a way of unveiling the strangeness that exists in the things that are familiar to us.”*

The videos shown here are also marked by a rejection of the illusion of depth and by a reflection – also found in Miró – on the transition from one state to another and the relationship between the moving and the fixed. Saquel explores “the way movement is found in immobility and the point at which things that are naturally mobile come to a stop”.*

“In this sort of camouflage (the confusion of textures, materials and natural elements) and constant transformation, it is the movement of the leaves, the passing of the wind, that I am interested in filming: travelling towards the detail of the textures and the nuances in the colours, showing, in short, the movement of a wall even though it is supposed to be still. My purpose is to recall the experience of the gaze and contemplation that you can have when looking at a wall, as well as the feeling of being before a particular ‘nature’.”*

By slowing down or speeding up her images, and by the use of the dissolve between the shots, Saquel merges space and time, thereby giving an air of strangeness to an ordinary landscape and offering us the experience of a different temporality.” Marie-Therese Champesme

*Quotations taken from Carolina Saquel’s notes

Commissioned by Fondació Joan Miró, Bacelona and coproduced by Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains for the solo show “La Catásfrofe es amarilla”, Espai 13, Fondació Joan Miró Barcelona, 2007

Exhibition: La catástrofe es amarilla