Studio | perlakrauze

The Shrine of Perla Krauze

"Poetry is participation of the great in the small as well as of the small in the great"

Gaston Bachelard. The air and the dreams.

Calle José Alvarado 24-A, between Monterrey and Medellín, in the Roma neighborhood. A narrow street of old houses that still preserve their original style from back in the forties-fifties of the last century. It is the workshop of the plastic artist Perla Krauze (Mexico, DF 1953), a two-story building that she has preserved as it is, except for the lower part of the large room with high windows that overlook the patio and where most of it is housed. Of his work.

Wooden stairs, stave floors, mosaics, bathrooms, doors, a labyrinth of rooms and small rooms, everything in that house breathes an atmosphere of seclusion, of loving care, of scrupulous diligence. And for the record, I am not talking about order in the strict sense, since it is a painting workshop, among other manual trades that are practiced there, but rather an atmosphere of resonances in which I am immersed, guided by the artist's voice.

- All these works that you see are for me moments of becoming that stop artificially, they are part of the memory of my walks, my trips, my journeys. It is giving the fragment a presence of Totality, an awareness of being and being that tells me something that wants to dialogue with me ”, says Perla Krauze.

Perla Krauze's plastic work is in the first instance a poetic visual reconciliation between spirit and matter; It requests an introspective stopping before our surroundings, an exercise in contemplative intimacy, entering a state of Being "dreamy" like the one that infantile innocence can experience in its exploration and discovery of the world around.

The feeling that receives those who enter the workshop of Perla Krauze, in her plastic cosmos, is to enter a sanctuary where a poetics of the fragment, of the pieces, of a kind of groups of chaos arranged on the ground, explodes. the walls, in boxes, in pictures, photographs, cardboard, fabrics, and what one would say are thresholds that invite us to approach physically, to cross them with the imagination, to touch the objects and pieces with the five senses. And it is not that this cosmos has been fragmented to reveal itself, but rather that thanks to each fragment its reality is revealed, rearranged, its diversity manifests itself, its hidden language of infinite forms.

In this rearrangement, which gives primacy to the eye, there is no forced aesthetic will because the fragments speak for themselves, they are left free to express themselves, they emerge summoned by the eye that discovers them, by the hand that accommodated them in a certain way. form (form and forms that can vary and reveal other ways of Being, of being, of raising up that same fragment, that same piece, that object) in a constant alchemy between the fragment, the space it occupies and the viewer (and viewer is before anyone else the artist himself). More than looking for the beauty of objects, of matter, it is exposing their Voice, removing their anonymity, celebrating them, “baptizing” them.

Stones of any size, crystals, roots, trunks, branches, flowers, woods, boxes, fabrics, papers, threads, rods, unusual everyday objects, insignificant, precarious, common and ordinary, large, medium, small, that are singled out Thanks to the intervention of the artist who portrays, draws, tattoos, paints them - "I intervene to make them more mine, closer," says Perla - as if extracting their essence, their secret, awakening their soul. In fact, yes, it encourages them, fills them with imagination: grooves, cracks, scratches, dents, creases, footprints, in the asphalt, on the walls, the floorboards, patios, streets, sidewalks. It is about rescuing their imprint, the imprint that everyday use left on them; It is about making visible what we do not see because it does not seem transcendent to us and that nevertheless keeps memory, a memory that can be registered, made transparent, calcined, recycled, reproduced in molds of other materials: fiberglass, resin, clay, porcelain , aluminum, lead, sugar inclusive.

The sensation that this universe transmits where each fragment speaks to us of a cosmic unit, is that of self-absorption -and in fact it is that Bachelardian self-absorbed reverie that offers us that sanctuary of spatial plasticities-, of intimacy with the quiet Voice of matter, its stillness, its silence that screams the bustle of what is within the apparent stillness. Because, in fact, in reality everything is in motion, like those photographs of the sky, the sea, the snow, like our memories: everything is time absorbed in the frame of the photo, the frame, the box, the mold, the page, the canvas, two-dimensional, three-dimensional time, hologram time, temporospatial topographies in permanent dialogue with the ephemeral, with the natural and its need for artificial, fictitious, illusory recreation, since, paraphrasing Bachelard, reality is missing something more than reality itself.

The space in which Perla Krauze's plastic work unfolds is inhabited by a mobility that radiates waves, happening, by geometries that undulate their angles and lines as if they were traveling, by objects that give off "dreamy gleams", by ladders, stairs and steps that ascend, levitate, fly, through rooms where each object finds its home, its intimate shelter, shelters that concentrate the poetic being of that object, that fragment, that material body, within its limit but without enclosing it, rather, on the contrary, opening it to the gaze and infecting the viewer with the same meticulous eagerness to See that characterizes the plastic artist.

All the fragments, pieces, objects, bodies that inhabit and make up the poetic sanctuary of Perla Krauze give rilkeanly testimony of her "overflowing existence", and each one of them evokes a surprising coexistence of personal spaces that keep their independence from each other, spaces that they do not seek to unite, juxtapose or merge in a metaphor: they simply dialogue, they invite to look from a range of kaleidoscopic perspectives. Paradoxically, the more self-absorbed the object is, the more open it manifests itself, the less enclosed, the more exact in its being there, the more immense is its smallness, the more intimate its great size, the clearer is the sensation of its limitless infinity, the better it is revealed. consistency of his hidden voice, his identity.

There is something childishly naive in that itch (obsession?) Of Perla Krauze to collect "things" from the street, the beach, the countryside, the snow, something like permanently "inaugurating" the capacity to transform material forms into a total surrender to the sensitive richness of Nature, as if matter did not resist the imagining power of the eye and agreed to give it its intimate essence without exhausting it, without, when exposed by the artist's gaze, losing its secret, its modesty.

And Perla Krauze's eye, her LOOKING, has the ability to see the object as an infinite material that it contains in its shape, its color, its weight, its volume, the infinity of the universe. Hence, the space where the artist displays her work has that aura of silent mobility that vibrates and arouses in the viewer tides of images, feelings, remembrances, daydreams. Bachelard would speak of “materializing the imaginary”, given that “the way we escape from the real, clearly discovers our intimate reality” ...

Esther seligson

Mexico DF, February 2010.

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