THE WANDERING STORIES OF CECILIA PAREDES, IN BLANCA BERLIN

By Álvaro de Benito Fernández | September 24, 2024

From her different interdisciplinary perspectives, Cecilia Paredes (Lima, Peru, 1950) lands in Blanca Berlin with a collection of images that deal with imaginary cartographies, displacements and human relations in their conceptual part, materialized, above all, on canvas as the main exhibition material. In Historias errantes (Wandering Stories), the Peruvian artist bets on recovering graphic materials anchored in antiquity, such as astrological charts, engravings of discoveries and maps, which become, after the manipulation of the parts, absolute compositions of impossible -but also aesthetic- iconography.

THE WANDERING STORIES OF CECILIA PAREDES, IN BLANCA BERLIN

Although his most (re)known work wanders through other technical territories, the presence of his most recent production in this show delves into that aspect of handling embroidery and fabric as another alternative to express the areas in which he develops his work and that he already showed in a similar way in his proposal Celestials (2018).

 

Paredes has been working for a long time with colonialism, travel, the past and memory, axes that underlie these Historias errantes and that reconstruct and recover not only that more instrumental vision, but that part that corresponds to the objects with which he operates of a certain sentimental, archaic, certainly historical substrate, but of enormous beauty and artistic value, as well as of undoubted recoverer of memory.

 

The result of the series Mito y memoria (Myth and Memory), the main skeleton that vertebrates the route proposed by the gallery, recalls styles and perceptions far away in time and plays with the anachronism of them as the main vector to position itself in its intention to make understand the value of temporal references and the behavior of them in places and moments that do not correspond to them. They are imagined lexicons, symbols of the past that may have lost their original function, but that, in no case, have abandoned their aesthetic facet.

 

There are dialogues between pieces of other equally novel proposals to her credit that are interspersed in the process to enrich the understanding of the artist's vision. The two pieces of Maneras de ver el cielo (Different Ways to See the Sky) also serve as a cartography of diversity, of the cosmos that grows in the relationships and behavior of a diversity seen in perspective, while the pair of Apuntes personales (Personal Notes), with a more personal and subjective intrinsic story, reinforces the idea of the textile as a representation of the tangible, but also of the metaphor of intertwining, the same that the viewer approaches when confronted with the totality of this proposal.

 

Historias errantes can be seen until November 2 at Blanca Berlin Gallery, Limón, 28, Madrid (Spain).

 

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