MIAMI.- “Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.”(i) Regarding this statement by Pierre-Jean Jouve, Gaston Bachelard expresses that, even if the form was known, perceived in its common places, it was, before the inner poetic light, a simple object. “But the soul inaugurates. It is first power, it is human dignity. The soul comes to inaugurate the form, to inhabit it, to be pleased with it.” Gisela Romero makes the worthy object of his poetry table runner or centerpiece of his home lost in the geography of the diaspora, making it the axis of his artistic discourse on exile. With that rug that covered the family gathering table of a house blurred by the distance, he has rebuilt a new house from his memories and longings, a house without walls, a house in the air like the house of immigrants, but a centerpiece is enough, a simple table runner, to anchor her in herself, in an essential house, an abode of immensity where her dreams live and where she invites us to share her table and admire that line of fabric impregnated with her nostalgia. This is an installation (Installation) titled A Constant Goodbye: The Table Runner Storiesexhibition by the artist Gisela Romero at the Art & History Museums Maitland, Florida, which opens on January 27, 2024.
For many, the enormous dimension of intimacy and the metaphorical potential of seemingly banal objects goes unnoticed. Juan Bosco Díaz Urmeneta writes: “These silenced objects make possible the relationships that weave our lives and form what we call the world. This vindication of things produces a change in perception. Because, rescued from anonymity, these objects acquire a clear metonymic value: they are parts that refer to a whole, to the network of relationships in which we live, to what we call the world.(ii)
For Gisela Romero, her table runner is, at the same time, metaphor and metonymy: “When I emigrated to the United States, I did so with a single suitcase. In it I put an object that I thought would link my old life with the new one that was about to begin, an object that I was in my old house and I would be in the new one. To connect with what I was leaving and what was waiting for me, I chose a centerpiece or table runnerit was easy to fold and fit in the suitcase, it was something that was always present on the family table, a simple object that I felt had absorbed all the conversations and love that took place around it, it became for me a symbol of the unity of my family”, expresses the artist.
The classical perspective of art as an aesthetic expression coexists in the present with various trends in contemporary art, one of them is that of Conceptual Art, where apart from traditional canons, the artistic resides in the idea of the creator and his subjectivity gravitates in the way in which you arrange the elements so that the public interprets the message you want to communicate. Art critic John Anderson highlights that, “the work of conceptual art is located in its concept, relying on the structures around it – be it language or the museum institution -, which shape the viewer’s experience of the work.” .(iii)
Gisela Romero’s proposal, which I place within this trend, is conceived as an “installation”, where the idea is more significant than the form or the group that supports the work. The objective is to impact the public and make them actively interact in the search for the meaning projected by the artist. In this exhibition, Gisela Romero has displayed texts, drawings, objects, textiles and abstract paintings gravitating from a table runner, a simple centerpiece or table mat. While metaphor is the substitution of one word for another, metonymy is the connection of one word with another word. Metaphor is linked to being, metonymy to its lack. He table runner It is an object-subject that evokes that lack and has immense intimacy. Gisela Romero reveals hers without subtleties when doing that table runner the subject of his banishment: “My portrait today is an unfinished work of art in pieces that perhaps someone in the future will look at and try to put together the parts to observe my face or my body. Many immigrants are just pieces that barely represent what was once a unity, because we leave a lot in the place where we come from and it is inevitable that, even if we build a new place, something is missing, we become a divided body. My left hand is in one country, an eye in another, my torso is in another, an ear in another, my mouth in another, a leg is in another. I am pieces of myself in the hearts of my family scattered around the world. “I am fragments of a country of glass that fell to the ground and when it broke, it scattered its pieces everywhere, without mercy, dragging those who inhabited it to an undeserved abyss.”
François Cheng, writer at the French Academy, tells us that “there was a time when humanity appreciated the things that served it, felt gratitude towards them, established a bond of sympathy, maintaining them as long as possible, even when they were dilapidated. Treated in this way, things acquired a dignity. A piece of cloth has a soul, for having witnessed our life. The objects that preciously preserve our memories, which we sometimes relegate to oblivion, can be a useful support for us if we agree to turn them into valuable interlocutors. They are there to remind us that life is not necessarily a total waste. Our familiar objects can serve as support and comfort, they are there to call us to be happy. If we give value to the relationship with things, how can we not finally address the relationship with ourselves and with other beings?(iv)
The space of the installation provokes in the viewer an immersion in the concept of immigration constructed by the artist with a narrative so moving that it reminds me of what, in his spiritual itinerary, the writer Oscar Milosz (1877-1939), expressed about the objects-memories: “To take the dream to its depths to be moved by the great museum of insignificant things, the mystery of things, of the small feelings that they transmit and that allow us to find a place in the great void of eternity.”(v) For Milosz, memory objects help us put order to the past.
About the artist
Gisela Romero (1960) is an American visual artist of Venezuelan origin, with more than 30 years of experience in the art world, she lives and works in Orlando, FL. She graduated in 1982 as a Graphic Designer from the Institute of Design, Neumann Foundation, Caracas; In 1985 she earned a BFA with honors from the California College of Arts, Oakland, CA.; her and in 1992 a master’s degree in fine arts from Pratt Institute, New York. She has been awarded important awards and recognitions for her artistic work exhibited in dozens of individual and group exhibitions in important international galleries.
This exhibition will remain from January 27 to April 15, 2024, in Art & History Museums of Maitland’s Maitland Art Centerlocated at 231 W. Packwood Ave. Maitland, FL 3275. On January 26 between 6:30 pm and 9:00 pm will be the inaugural event.
Bibliography
(i) Pierre Jean Jouve, Mirrored. Journal without date. Mercure de France, 1954.
(ii) Juan Bosco Díaz Urmeneta, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Journey to Things Themselves2017.
(iii) John Anderson, Conceptual Art: New Strategies for Meaning (2012). Quoted by Enrique Garcia
Parreno, Virtual/Actual. Definitions of a realityFaculty of Fine Arts of Sant
Carles, 2018.
(iv) François Cheng, The value of the things around us. Le Figaro, 04/28/2020
(v) Oscar-Vladislas de Lubicz-Milosz, The loving initiation. Editions Alphée, 2004.
