The rest is memory

This exhibition brings together a series of works from my most recent work where you can see the motifs that have been recurrent in it: the figure and its disappearance, the light that reveals it and hides it, the light also as the only protagonist, and the suggested landscape.

The title is taken from a poem by Louise Glück entitled Nostos, or Return Home, which in its last part reads:

We look at the world once, in childhood.

The rest is memory.

I like these verses for the melancholic vision of memory they contain. A memory that circles and returns to the themes over and over again, circles around that center from which it interprets everything else.

My work, instead of advancing linearly to reach a goal, perseveres in making multiple registers and finding a thousand versions of the same thing. The series - if that is the normal format of work - seem not to want to close.

My own work process already starts from a constant activity of collecting images that I later play at cutting and combining as a previous phase to drawing.

In recent years I have been interested in making visible in some way this process of collage and repetition of themes, as occurs for example in the drawings of the series Archivo, 2023, which are present in this exhibition, where fragments of figures already used in other drawings can be seen on folded papers on the floor of my current studio.

And, more specifically, the phrase I have chosen for the title of this exhibition, The rest is memory, is a reference to the need to make use of memory when an image has so much that is unsaid, suggested.

The unsaid has a great power to trigger imagination and desire: absence makes memory creative, which is completed by the existence of what it has already seen - quotes, images, an alien existence.

I like to unbalance the compositions, to try to maintain the fragmentary character that was part of the composition. Many images are therefore cut at intermediate moments, like pauses that belong to longer times, where the figure is halfway to its disappearance or about to merge with space, and the latter is reduced to its minimum expression, almost like a geometric abstraction. They are like photograms - cinema has always been a great influence - of a story that is unfinished and insistent in its repetition.

Constructing memory from fragments suspends the images in time, giving them a sense of frozen infinity and deliberate silence.

Irene González