Another folds of the soul

 

Another Folds of the Soul: Tamara Arroyo

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Written in english by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  Recognized since ancients and classics to current moderns philosophy and the arts, a negation of the soul is yet unknown.  

  While almost everyone coincident to recognize the Leibniz monad as the only one concept that fullfully embody the soul, there is also a lot of efforts to express the soul by images.   

  Within one of his best passages on Leibniz and the Baroque Gilles Deleuze compared the soul with an interior grand piano when inside policromized woods the sound acoustically echoes, and in the same passage he uses the image of a window near to the sealing in a chapel or a church when we can far perceive the light coming from outside to inside transformed into colour by the window glasses.  

  By this two Deleuze passages the soul images looks to be evoqued rather than represented since the soul seems to be irreducible to representation itself. 

  As a concept and a sensible dimension of the senses the soul results to be inapprehensible from all its sides and by that reason unrepresentable, something relates the soul impressions to the Inmaterials and/or demattered, but given that the soul also suggest feelings of being real states, it is also a sublime dimension of sensibility. While inapprehensible by an image capability to visually embody it, the soul also nears to be seen as incorporeal or as the otherness of the body, toward the spiritual. 

  By this reason the soul suggests figures that opposites anything which like bodies can be delined, environs or outline cutted as corpus or coupures. 

  In fact, since it can’t be a corpus defined within an area, a zone, a plane or a cutted space it seems to be infinity by all its sides while at the same time only inside a monad related to the body as “the single one of each one” versus the multiple, the sensation of the soul can be feel and perceived. 

  Certainly everyone feels his soul, paradoxically, only inside himself body. 

   Such an ambivalent oscillation of the soul between something without a body or corpus like an inapprehensible immaterial or intangibility and the paradox by which the soul can only be feel by each one being inside the single one body near to remember the status of surfaces at the philosophy of forms since only a surface can really be infinity gazed from the all sides without a body and be at the same time a tangible dimension. 

  According to this logic of surfaces a living room in an architectural whole seems to follows a similar principle regarded to geometry, when a room appears to be to the  impressions something like to double, to fold or to bend a same surface creating contiguous spaces making rooms, inside and nor insides, outsides to such insides and then insides to other outsides. Like in the pure abstractions of the soul, space appears here as a same and unique surface that angle and double creating contiguous spaces, it is a kind of Fold and a fold itself, in fact, consist about in a same surface folding that distributes light on one side and shadow in the other so that a fabric of folds or a linen sheet of folds’ impressions here another folds of the soul.

  I will then statement here that a significant part of Tamara Arroyo art can be read as visual explorations and images of the soul sublimes, complex and rich forms to evoque it, I am mainly thinking here about pieces such as Structure IV I already discussed from other perspectives but I also want to show how it prevalence around almost all Tamara art and mostly at her earliers. While Structure IV itself appears like an extended bidimensional surface to the space in a form I defined like bidimensional beings, there is also visually folds in Tamara IKEA cloth and more precisely in Tamara white ceramics defined to be white folds over iron surrounds.

  And this reading brings me to Tamara earlier previous art when the soul as an issue was stronger than currently.

  Richer than a surface since the soul additionally evolve the relation between an inside and an outside, it is to each one being an absolute inside, the interior of the single one being body, but it is also something that overflows it and looks to be then over outsides, outsides however that still regarded to the soul stay to be again an inside. Tamara earlier art can be then discussed as rich explorations of this dimension of the inside and the outside immersed at the intimacy interior of being and then to the relations of such an inside with its outsides. 

  I am mostly thinking here about Tamara earlier pieces of drawings with black lines on white surfaces when she choiced real objective empty white rooms in architecture to draw and reproduce fullfully on the walls the fine drawings of all domestic objects and elements usually surround and environment an everyday life quotidian habitat such like chairs, tables and letlee furniture’s at home. 

  There is nothing more an inside as space to the spiritual feelings of being than the intimacy of habitat when she sometimes also included herself visual presence on a chair with her hair covering her face or thinking at the living room. 

  The principles of the black line suggest the interior of the house like the inside respect to the outside. 

  In this pieces the environment of life in the house expresses the interior space in a mode that is the same one or similar to the sensations of the soul as an absolute inside to the body interior. From another perspective, elements of the quotidian life extend from her interior ŵorld to exit now from that interior to those space when the inside and the outside communicates in between, the last one always seen from the inside. 

  Her window series is an example of the above specially at the beginning when she draws it with black line on empty white rooms but also when she extended it to tridimensional windows on woods, the window itself symbolize our gazing to the outside from inside, through a window we seen the seen the window propose as frame and through a window the light entrance to the room distributing together with our impressions and sensations of intimacy life, the visible between light and shadow, also air and weather goes to inside through mainly windows. 

  Through windows a being locates an exteriorized and objective form that like the eye from the body looks out, it is the window itself as a frame proposal of seen. It is the same principle that organize the relation between the body as an inside recipient to being and its outsides visualized out, the window as symbol. Thanks to a window we seen in the gaze beyond the domestic space to the city, it symbolizes in the gaze all we seen and feel from inside around.

  This relation between insides and outsides acquired also a form at Tamara London piece when a black line exit to draw spaces internal to the externals and externals to the internals when what is interior and what’s is exterior exchange, the interior can be exterior to another interior and the exterior interior to another exterior. Beyond the relation house/inside/home/habitat/soul now we also have elements of architecture symbolizing such an exchange as an stair.  

  It is no longer in Tamara earlier drawings pieces with black lines a material biography as I earlier proposed to discuss this concept about Tamara current iron neominimalist works. 

  While in her current art she explores the semantic resonances of the referent or the sensorial proximity aperceptual memory of the body disseminating the referent like letlee clues, our body memories of a foots for example, or a certain form to do a bidimensional Surface place and non place, the social origin we recognize to a certain kind of iron as a urban or social Biography, a kind of Venice lattice window or decorative figure we remember from the city architectures designs, a plastic or a glass materials as remembered in habitats, objects, markets or urban spaces, the sensation of division between areas in the house by a certain structure, ornaments, curtains, furniture’s, etc, in her earlier black lines drawings she instead afforded real spaces of habitat as sublime spaces, it was then beyond metonyms when by letlee fragments we can get a sense of an evoqued but not represented whole, in her earlier pieces the real spaces of habitats at home and domestic space was directly afforded by the line figuratives. 

  The relation with an intimacy memory even familiar seems to be pivotal or major in that earliers something clear at her pencil drawings recreating by imagination her impressions of architecture during her Roma grand, like for example her imagination on the houses her mom and dad live in Italy or her memories of the family cars. 

  A synchronic spatiality of the process regarding everyday life seems to be also major in Tamara nor only at her notes Books of drawings but at the methodology of her work in general something that reference her art to a processual time relevant in three ways, aleatorism at the creative process, the way she relates to architecture and the ways she relates to art as institution. I am mostly thinking here regarding the aleatorials in Tamara relational compositions at Bilbao during her Bilbao grand when she stablished a variety of relations proposals between the same elements to do letlee exhibits at her Bilbao studio space such like the plastic boxes markets reticulars, the Venice lattice windows, the ikea cloths, fabric waves, ornaments or letlee woods getting it in several different forms between flour and walls, something she earlier explored in a form less elaborated as interventions with fabrics in spaces.

  Aleatorism, however, a concept that remember the work of John Cage an artist related with music is less present in her recent art such like Structures IV and some other based in iron. 

  Such a synchronic spatiality of the process addressing the continuum of life also major the ways she relates to architecture as we should not forget that almost all the figurative motives she is currently exploring with neominimalist iron are inspired by and sometimes directly referent to such figures in city architectural ornamentals like used iron at windows, columns, doors designs, external back yards or courts. Certainly she walk a way through the city making photography’s of architecture something starting a new moment of an investigation on architecture that she earlier begging now addressed to her thesis, the methodological issues I refers before.  

  Concrete practiced to her recent iron pieces and anticipated to her thesis preparation her reading of architecture, however, even when exteriorized as an objective photographic research with her accent on the relation body-city, stay to be an approaching of everyday life in a sense of synchronic processual temporality and we should point out a distinction or a difference between this here and now of the time passing and extrinseque mixtures of codes of the usual postmodernist parameters in architecture when even beyond Ventury, postmodern architecture in general tend to mix forms seen as pregiven by diachronically periodized styles clichés and this supposes different ways to afford culturalism. 

  While the usual, more typical postmodern parameters in architecture assumed to stands forms as cloused by a diachronic historicity of it which first periodized it and late mixed it as an mixation of externals inscribed clichés when culture is recognized by styles and genres inscribed codes in forms, this more synchronic way to assume everyday life supposes therapeutic processes of continuums life when culture is recognized by open becomings, an endogenous relation between the body and habitat, processes in formation and alosemiotic transformations of culture. 

  This difference if we consider the eclecticism results of postmodernism in architecture can remember the differences between baroque and rococo in the XVIII century and is related with a tend to mix external codes like ingredients are mixed for example in a genere of albums in music defined as pupurri, when contraposed ritms of completely different genres are mixed together. 

  Today, however, after all, the ways to define ourselves as avant-gardists to postmodernism are again a form of commentaries, like it was during the first avant-garde ways to let know how to be related with cultural modernism.

  A good example can be here the good jazzist musician who show to us inside his jazz pieces everything he want to let know to us on other genres such as rock, bolero or son from his jazz piece as forms of comments.  

  Finally, this synchronicity seems to also be major to approach how Tamara affords art as institution something about which I would like to choice to reference an specific of her pieces on this issue when she presented the drawings of the interior architectural halls spaces in perspectives of an artistic institution in Madrid created thanks to the previous formation of a bank its capital was earlier created by emigrants with the sales of their bodies and life objects, something Tamara suggested by drawings the inventary of such objects collected in a wood piece of furniture just like those specialized to the conservation of collections. 

Discussed Works

Tamara Arroyo, Structures IV

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos en Líneas negras del espacio de habitad, muebles, elementos, objetos que reproducen el espacio interior de habitad en habitación blanca

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos en Líneas negras del espacio de habitad, muebles, elementos, objetos que reproducen el espacio interior de habitad en habitación blanca con foto sentada en la silla en habitación contigua

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos en Líneas negras del espacio de habitad, muebles, elementos, objetos que reproducen el espacio interior de habitad en habitación blanca con foto acostada en el sofa

Tamara Arroyo, Primeros Dibujos en Líneas negras de ventanas en espacios-habitaciones blancas vacías

Tamara Arroyo, Mejor vista de Ventanas llevadas a tridimension

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos en Líneas negras de escalera, London 

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos, Casas Imaginadas de la Familia, Roma

Tamara Arroyo, Dibujos, Memorias de Automóviles, Roma 

Tamara Arroyo, Selección de piezas desarrolladas como pequeñas exposiciones en el studio en Bilbao, Instalaciones en el estudio con elementos en la pared y en el piso, Tela de IKEA, Cenefa, Celosías, Maderas

Tamara Arroyo, Piezas anteproyectadas de vaciados de Pliegues en yeso

Tamara Arroyo, Relación a Arquitectura, Estructuras en Proceso, vista de la instalación en la feria set up en Bologna, barras de hierro y barras de hierro calibradas curvadas

Tamara Arroyo, Relación a Arquitectura, Discutidas en el otro ensayo previo

Tamara Arroyo, Obra dibujo de la institución y mueble con los objetos envueltos

References

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Material Biography: Some Tamara Arroyo Drawings and Installations

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Intramundane Horizont, Pp, The Intramundane Horizont

Gilles Deleuze, El Pliegue: Leibniz y el Barroco

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, The University of Minnesota Press