The geometric dimension of artistic creation responds, above all, to the primary need to elucidate the reasons on which the real is founded, reasons that reveal a logical–formal structure and that are therefore distinct from analogical representation, which merely gathers the apparent and transient data of the empirical reality of things. From this perspective, «geometric» art clearly cannot be anything other than «abstract»; more specifically, it will situate itself within the dimension of «abstraction» rather than that of the «abstract», not only because it maintains an indispensable and meaningful bond with the dimension of the reality «of the object», seen in its rationally «objective» transposition, but also because, taking things as its point of departure, it cannot help but strike a dissonant note with respect to the «abstract» — as is the case, for example, with «Lyric Abstractionism», which, by contrast, is set in motion by the imaginative mind of the creating subject.
In discussing Inés Silva’s creative dimension in these terms, it seems appropriate to introduce further arguments, valid not only for supporting the artist’s place within the camp of «abstraction» rather than that of the creative «abstract», but also for offering an interpretive key to the constructive robustness that sets her apart.
It might be easy, for instance, to invoke the Cézannian lesson and to recall that the art of our own time finds in it the coryphaeus and standard-bearer of every new conception to emerge in the twentieth century, precisely by virtue of its fundamental intuition: that of composing works by articulating masses on a canvas across which the gradation of planes and volumes is distributed. The relationship between this consideration and Cubism, for example, is territory that has been widely explored by art criticism and art historiography.
Likewise, though less evidently, there emerge the links between these two movements and «geometric» scansions. These matters nonetheless deserve a discussion that sets out certain explanations, so that nothing is taken for granted or regarded as settled. The work of Inés Silva can provide a most useful and exemplary point of reference in this regard.
Now, between Cézanne’s spatial articulation and the essential articulation of geometry, we ask ourselves: what further relationship can be established, once we have correctly understood that both positions secure a simplification of the representation of things?
We would like to think that the very formulation of this question carries an intrinsic contradiction, since it is necessary to grasp, in its deepest meaning, the expression we used above: «simplification of the representation of things».
Now, while it is indisputably true that Cézanne rearticulates the canvas of the real «object» by reducing it to simple forms, geometry does not start from the empirical consistency and the «object» of the real, but rather from its «objectivity».
The representation — if it may still be called that — of the real more geometrico will therefore be, in terms of «geometric abstraction», an eidetic rather than an iconic representation; and to anyone who might try to argue that this would draw the «geometric» scansion toward the «lyrical» profile of Abstractionism, we shall reply that, on the contrary, the opposite is true. It is borne out — even through this other approach — that whereas «Lyric Abstractionism» is set in motion within the head of the artist, who inwardly conceives the project of the work to be realized, that is, through a gesture of the «realizable» kind, «Geometric Abstractionism» proceeds instead from what the mind has already purged down to the eidetic essence of the real, endowing it with revealing scansions according to a gesture that will be of the «normative» kind or, if one prefers, «formal» and «canonical».
It might seem that our reasoning lies far removed from the work of Inés Silva; we believe, however, that it has taken this course for two good reasons.
First, because Inés’s work is marked by a decisive richness of content that calls for consideration of its volumetric ordering and demands an interpretation of the spatial reasons it expresses, so as to define, in this way, a decisive consistency of content.
And second, because the artist’s work presents itself precisely as an art that reveals and gives expression to those hermeneutic considerations that allow us to penetrate, with the necessary precision, the frontiers of Cubist practice — a practice that distinguishes creative anxieties from «geometric» logics, the latter asserting themselves with an absolute impetus of identity.
Inés Silva thus enables an interpretive outline of a general order such as this one to find not only the matrix of its necessary theoretical function, but also its practical capacity to make art real, demonstrating in actual fact how much the consistency of the «matter» of «geometric» abstraction, practiced in the «concrete» of creative enjoyment, can confer upon the eidetic reasons that inspire it: that practicality of experience without which the idea of art could never be art.
Rosario Pinto
Spanish translation: Andreína Hernández
Translated from the Spanish.