After the personal exhibition Ensayo para encontrar el camino de regreso, the exhibition De memoria and other works carried out in the Alvear de Zurbarán Gallery of Buenos Aires have finished, they will be exhibited in the Minicelli Museum, Festivals in Colombia, and in the Carnacini Museum between August and December of 2016.
An Neoclassical facade, a checkerboard yard, galleries in semicircular arches on inked drawings over the fabric, canvas, sheets, boards, or school desks with palimpsests of graffiti’s. From the wing to the stretcher in the theater of life, the characters in Claudia Galllina’s imagination, children and teenagers, they teach.
They leave signs to the audience while they play the endless game of playing and growing, learning, going through less circulated paths looking for answers about themselves, the human being and nature, in their most urgent moment.
How do you conceptually tackle the complex social mirror?
I try to tackle it in the most natural way possible. Many will read the layer of the memories, but the one I am most interested about is the one that makes questions that are difficult to answer. For that I speak in singular and come back to the childhood to understand the present. I believe that the constant knowledge is essential, that is why the education is a concept that does not easily neglects me.
How does the patch emerges, a common factor in your backgrounds?
It plastically contains my works, It indicates the composition, dictates the palette, and gives character. It born as the original patch of the creation to capture an image, as an alchemy. It matters to me and it uses the expression “from where we come from and from where we go”. The memory that I believe we take from other place and has to be decoded.
There is a central concept as a mandala and other that is more orthogonal. Why is that? Who sees beyond the already seen?
I use the perspective area as an observer in the main floor. I see what happens and I paint it.
I am interested in the mandalas from the energy that the symbols apply in my work. This questions makes me remember a Borges’ tale where he meets, as an older person, with the young Borges in Geneva. The piece is a dialogue with himself and he developed it coming back to his childhood or to his adolescence.
You were born in a decade where it was unusual to become an artist.
It was a time that my father did not supported, it was hard to live from the art in that period, but I took courage, I signed up in the School of Fine Arts and graduated even though it was not easy the working process beyond the college degree.
Tell us about the inclusive art and your participation in the public art.
I always believed in an art for everybody, that is why I like festivals and fairs, away from the galleries’ sacredness. I had the fantasy of becoming a muralist, my first trip to Mexico confirmed it and I made several murals in Buenos Aires, like the one in the Acoyte station of the A Line in the Subway, the hall of the Tres de Febrero University, the Mural for the memory of the Armenian Genocide in the AMIA.
What impact had Camila, your inspirational muse?
The school years of my daughters activate my senses, an asleep world. One afternoon, Camila, my youngest daughter, wanted to paint and I give her a patched fabric. When she finished her drawing made with chalk over black, I visualized a world to which I wanted to belong, the one of children and their drawing without ambitions, natural. I completed my piece with her creation, the starting point of this journey.
You are soon returning to Colombia. In Medellin the philosopher and degree honoris causa Martha Nussbaum made an impact with her speech where she discuss about a serious and unknown world crisis, where profitable careers are created over the social and artistic ones, which results in the creation of useful machines instead of sensitive and critical citizens. What can you share form your personal experience?
The human kind points out far from the man, from the art as a human expression, from the thoughts and the creation of ideas. Mi work researches the big problem of human kind, the rift from nature and how hard it is to find ourselves. I fantasy with theories of conspiracy, the education and art, they would no be exempted from it.
What is you method of returning to the path of nature?
I worked a long time in interiors, nature was a pending subject to understand what happens to us. Mi work is a journey to creation and nature is the great teacher, we have to listen to it and for that we need to slow down a little.
How it was to participate in “Seis murales para la memoria” (Six murals for the memory)?
It was great. I wondered what do I have to do with the armenian genocide and the answer came shortly. We all have something to do with that, we all are armenian, missing, the AMAIA, native people. The mural format made long-lasting and public this work for the conscience.
How do you live the freedom of creating as you grow?
One of the big fights you have to face when entering the art circle, is against the great powers. The freedom has to be found daily. The education subject is an ellipsis, for moments it gets away or it forces me to rediscover it. Right now I am investigating other materials and the objectual. Conceptually, I want to go back to the origin, to the drawing in dialogue with objects and sculptures.
Why aquarelle?
I took it as sketch material and it works for big pieces. I like it because it noble, organic, it waits for you and is transparent, I defend it from the empowerment of the oil over the fabric.
As in the Modulor of Le Corbusier, what organizes the dimension and the palette in your work?
I organize from the eyes of a children, big spaces and small characters. The palette was ruled by the black of the board and the muddy landscape of Buenos Aires. Investigate nature and the aquarelle, the bring the color that I so long missed.
How is the Claudio that teaches?
I try to be generous, of learning from the other and accompany. It is hard to have a personal identity, and by that point, the self-criticism is not enough.
The main characters of your pieces travel alone for Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Puerto Rico, United States, Peru, Germany, Spin, etc. What distinctive features emerge from the dissimilar cultures?
The Argentinian identity is strong as being in the outside. The subject presents the same predicament in Latin America, but what I really care about is the affinity and relation that generates in the teenagers.
What fears lie beneath in the Miedo al bosque y Alicia y el Lobo exhibition?
They are universal fears, those with who you deal with everyday and are carried in our DNA. The children tales that tend to have a second reading related to my work, you can read the superficial or go deep into the underground.
How does the clothing’s iconography outlines in the future of your work?
The student will always be present because the student is me.
Taking up the prediction of the remembered critic Albino Dieguez Videla in your exhibition Esperando una respuesta: “In a few years, these works will inform about the end of a world of board and chalk, of wooden benches, and printed books”, and recalling the boards of Rudolph Steiner that go over the world with their message. How do you see the influence of your work in the future?
Those words from the dearest Albino were extremely important to me. I had never thought about my work in that way. That my work could speak in the future is an honor, meanwhile I will continue painting.
Gallina’s works will return to the freely scenes to thrill and move us as discovering signs and non fearful coordinates. As in a circus of of scientific precision, brave and everlasting, the inner child, jumps sticked in the past towards the emptiness of the unanswered questions to continue discovering and learning, always.
August: From August 11 to 26 Eduardo Miniccelli Museum –
Exhibition “de memoria” (Río Gallegos-Argentina)
September and October: Fairs in Medellín and Bogotá (Colombia)
December: From December 17 to January 30 2017- Casa Carnacini Museum (Bs. As-Argentina)
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