Spiritual register

Although Claudia García Moritán has been painting for quite a few years now, the spiritual experience provided by a recent trip to Machu Pichu in 2003 aroused the artist’s need to hold her first individual exhibition.

The millenary world in the heights of Machu Pichu, with its bare stone buildings, its peculiar monumental architecture and the spiritual climate found there, awakened in Claudia García Moritán an existential identity that has given birth to this exhibition. History of Art abounds in examples of artists that have developed their creativity as from the identification with a certain theme. It is as though an unchaining force had been released in them thanks to that substantial theme.

The paintings now being exhibited by this artist, born from the affective impact of this encounter, recreate the spirit projected on the painter by the subject of her admiration, rather than by the place itself. Thus, her pictorial reconstruction is not literal. Issuing from the existing reality, it imaginatively elaborates certain places that are landmarks on her spiritual route.

“There are no facts, just interpretations,” said Nietzche, and it is from this personal interpretation that Claudia García Moritán lends life to corners of Machu Pichu: its stone walls, narrow passages, stairs, sacred rocks, mausoleums and “windows” that open on the surrounding landscape.

To render them in all their spiritual fullness, the artist avails herself of strictly plastic elements: symbolic treatment of light, appraising of silences, a certain parsimony of expression provided by the calm use of colour, structural rigour in the compositions.

To achieve a significant overall impression the artist has intelligently rejected group scenes or those that offer a monumental vision. She favours detail and a fragmentary vision, which allow her to poke into corners, and bring “to the eye” what it generally casts off in passing.

In this way, she allows the viewer of her work to put the pieces of the puzzle together and make it meaningful. The play on light and shadow allows the accents that each one brings to the reading to have the shades of expression claimed by personal vision.

Finally, these paintings inspired by Machu Pichu have their own autonomy. They constitute realities in themselves that are oriented toward an abstract pictorial conception in which – once again – the links existing between the archaic cultures of Andean America and many forms characteristic of modern painting can be appreciated.

Often, these relations are only formal and we witness empty expressions: rites with no myths. The value of this artist’s paintings is rooted in its power to convey not just a fact from the past, but a spiritual climate that we can assume to be valid in each one of us. In this way she succeeds in giving a present sense to myth.

Fermin Fèvre

Buenos Aires, May 2004.