In The Unknown Masterpiece, Honoré de Balzac leaves us an allegory: A painter, Frenhofer, spends ten years working on an image of a more or less imaginary woman; her beauty is so great it cannot be rendered, so the painter undertakes endless corrections. When he finally shows the finished painting to Pourbus and to Poussin, it is revealed that there is no woman—in fact, there is nothing recognizable in the painting. Perhaps Balzac is insinuating that Frenhof unwittingly discovered something new. More likely, though, the allegory indicates that beauty never cowers to stubborn will or, worse still, it delights in slipping away from it. The allegory in Mercedes Larreta’s work is the symmetrical reversal of that allegory: Like Frenhofer, Larretta works in secret, but she has always known, even if she has not wanted to admit it (even to herself), that beauty, like the wind, blows wherever it wants. She has never fallen into the arrogance of trying to change its direction; her art has grown with the joy and ease of certain dreams.
Jean-Luc Godard would say that if one looks at a white wall long enough something appears on it. Mercedes Larreta’s poetics turns white into its own sort of wait. The artist’s self-assured brushstroke in that blossoming is explained as much by waiting for the unexpected as by the conviction that, once it has arrived, it can only be the way it is.
The unexpected recurs, as do, in this show, colors (blues and greens) and themes. These recurrences could be organized in series, but there would be a single impulse behind them all: Mercedes Larreta’s work is unified. Think of dogs, think about how the look in their eye is represented. What looks at us in an animal’s gaze is something other than its eyes. What inhabits that gaze is not that animal’s own or isolated individuality. There is something in those eyes that waits, something that seems to transcend them. But what are those eyes—not only the eyes of dogs and cats, the critters most often in our midst, but also of birds and horses—waiting for? Are they waiting for something or, rather, are we waiting for something through them? In the eighth Diumo Elegy, poet Rainer Maria Rilke tries to return the mystery of that gaze when he writes, “What does exist outside we come to know / from their faces alone.” He goes on, “Its inner self, though, / is limitless, ungrasped with no regard / for its positioning, pure, like its clear gaze.” The animal sees what Rilke enigmatically calls “openness,” a horizon unfettered by the experience of time, which is our experience—and that is what these works by Mercedes Larreta let us catch glimpse of as well.
White, like silence, is openness waiting to be occupied only to be emptied out again. Mercedes Larreta’s art lays out that struggle-less friction between the full and the empty, that is, how fullness can only be found in emptiness.
Pablo Gianera