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Virtual Exhibition María Helguera Malevos 03/05/2007 - // Memory of the Skin Jaume Vidal Oliveras Buenos Aires – Barcelona, Barcelona – Buenos Aires: this is the idea illuminating this exhibition, a return trip between these two cities. After its presentation in Barcelona, at the Espai Volart, the show will travel to the capital of Argentina, where it will be seen at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. María Helguera began her artistic career in Argentina, but in 1976 would go into exile to Barcelona for political reasons, with her children and the photographer Humberto Rivas. Even with this distance, her contacts with Buenos Aires have been constant: in a certain way, Helguera has developed a role as a cultural bridge between the two countries, which is where the proposal to set up a dialogue between the two art centres has emerged from. At the end of the 1960s, when the artist began to exhibit in Buenos Aires, Helguera did a painting we could describe as both magic and realist, both in terms of motifs and treatment. The painting conjures up family relationships, solitude and love, constructing a cartography of her affective environment, as it were, with a fresh, transparent gaze. She was highly sensitive, spontaneous and direct. The person who was best able to capture this gaze was her husband, Humberto Rivas, in a famous photograph taken in 1979 that is now found in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya: María Helguera gazes at us straight on, her eyes full of fear and curiosity. Over time, that gaze would change. Those early pieces have the freshness of someone looking at the world for the first time. That said, in her personal imaginary realm there were shadows as well, although all stories are like that. María Helguera’s evolution was not linear, although we should point out that when she settled in Barcelona she soon began to adjust to the Catalan cultural microclimate: the colony of Argentine artists in the city, the people around the painter Hernández-Pijuan, the poet Arnau Pons, and so on. I have never spoken about these things with María, but I have the intuition that certain contacts were particularly important for her, such as with Ràfols-Casamada, for example. As María Helguera insists, Ràfols and Maria Girona invited her to join the Eina design school, where she would end up teaching. Apart from this, I imagine that this change opened up new aesthetic perspectives for her, or at least its influence seems to be present in the shift in her work from that point on. We do not know how Helguera’s work might have evolved if she had not gone into exile, but it is clear that Barcelona had a decisive influence on her career. The Catalan cultural atmosphere (or a certain sector of it, at least) contributed to her work and gave her tools that would enable her to reflect on her own culture and its source identity from another perspective. We should here include the magnetism of Antoni Tàpies at the time, which is still present today. His work with materiality, and his important writings in the search for transcendent art, something expressively primogenial and pure, even the artist’s heroic persona, echoed throughout the city in a way that María Helguera most likely perceived. As I have commented at the start, Helguera has always encouraged cultural exchange between Argentina and Spain. An example of this is the exhibition of contemporary Argentine art presented at Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in 1996. Even with this, an episode I find symptomatic that should also be emphasised was the initiative to organise an exhibition of Mapuche culture, the Argentine indigenous society from before Spanish and European colonisation. This exhibition, which took place in 2002, also featured a programme of debates and study sessions. My intention in highlighting this event is to emphasise that her concern for Mapuche culture was perhaps comparable to her interest in atavistic, primitive questions, in myths—something that was germinated from a distance, not in the work done in Argentina prior to 1976, but in Barcelona, in the context of a framework of reflection where Tàpies was a main point of reference. Starting in the late 1990s, María Helguera’s painting would be inspired by universal myths and symbols, an inspiration that—while in line with Tàpies’ explorations and those of other post-war artists—especially had to do with the will to consummate a deeply transcendent emotivity in art. 1 Virtual Exhibition María Helguera Malevos 03/05/2007 - // The Basement The Espai Volart is divided into two areas: one floor on street level and another lower floor that is a basement. In this regard, María Helguera’s exhibition seems to be an attempt to create a symbolic dialogue between these two spaces. In any path taken through the exhibition, the basement represents a sort of subconscious source for her more recent work, which is on the upper floor. The basement would be her roots, her depth, what is hidden—what we find are mythical vessels. On the lower floor two kinds of work can be observed. On the one hand, works are shown that repeat very precise motifs: horses, bulls, naked couples, pieces done in pure tones of red, ochre and yellow. With every necessary subtlety, these images are the symbol of primary, elemental nature, of animal energy. The artist’s intention is to articulate an ancestral or mythical iconography. On the other hand, we see work done by using registers from animal and human bodies. With a layer of pigment, living beings have left their unmediated mark on the canvas. In this case, María Helguera prolongates the experiences of Yves Klein, although with a different meaning: what interests her is the primary aspect of the print, the immediate mark of a body. These pieces retain the mystery that animates all life. Germination On the upper floor, Helguera shows her more recent production. In these pieces she has revived certain characters from Buenos Aires that had inspired her earliest work, while here they have been given a very different formal treatment. Now we are dealing with a more essential or simplified way of painting, which has been handled with a large amount of impasto and her use of the spatula. Her work also features iconographic motifs that surprised me when I first saw them: The Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Pietà. There is another significant aspect here as well: some of these female and male figures are overlaid, so it is hard to tell them apart. They are like hybrid beings discovered in an embrace of everlasting love. It is not at all easy to provide an interpretation for these works. Here we find María Helguera’s problematic as an artist, but also as a woman and as an individual human. La última milonga [The Last Milonga], a title that suggests The Last Supper, for example, is an homage to Joan Hernández Pijuan, who had died just before, in 2005, and who was close to Helguera. If I allude to this episode it is to explain the complexity and diversity of the implicit messages settled for in these works. Given this, in the context of the project we are observing here, with this shifting back and forth between Buenos Aires and Barcelona, the work of María Helguera has other meanings, or at least it can be read along different lines. Thus, the identification and overlaying of male and female figures expresses this very interaction between the two cities, something that is very important in Helguera’s work as a kind of magical association. The allusions to the Passion of Christ (The Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Pietà) could perhaps be identified with the path of exile, or with the way Helguera lives this out particularly, amongst other possible readings. There is another piece I have yet to make mention of which for me is the key to the exhibition. I refer to Las olas del tiempo [The Waves of Time], a sort of installation consisting of a white tunic hanging in the air, surrounded by fragments of drawings, with the sound of the sea in the background. Why then Las olas del tiempo? In the DVD accompanying the exhibition, María Helguera tells of an incident on the transatlantic passenger ship that took her into exile in 1976. Along the maritime route that connected Buenos Aires with Barcelona, the Spain-bound boat crossed with another that was going back to Argentina. 2 Virtual Exhibition María Helguera Malevos 03/05/2007 - // At that very moment, both ships sound their horns. The trip she was then taking was about going somewhere, but it also foresaw her future return: María Helguera had no choice but to go back. Could this tunic be interpreted as the vestment of a pilgrim, that person who travels in the direction of wisdom? At the end of the journey, the pilgrim is stripped of all former clothing and puts on a special garment, symbolising transformation and purification. Changing clothes is representative of the new man, in the same way that the journey itself has to do with transformation, the acquisition of a spiritual state. María Helguera’s white tunic, hanging in the air, is a symbol of purification, it represents renewal. Yet precisely for this reason, in this garment there is memory of pain, exile and of the “failed actions” the artist speaks of, with errors and suffering—all of this is what makes that spiritual transformation possible. This garment is just as well a kind of tattoo or written document, with ecos of some of the motifs announced in her paintings, the Crucifixion being one of them.

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