Concerning Black Holes
Over the course of a lengthy artistic career, Mercedes Elena González’s work has developed its own language through a voluminous production that began in the late 1970s. Born from an unrelenting creative impulse, her work explores a complex universe of images revealing the close ties between the physical body and scientific cosmology, biodiversity and structural systems.
Beginning in 1976, sidelined by the dominant trends that surrounded her in Venezuela, the feminine nature of González’s work established an explicit frame of reference that unfolds through a sophisticated practice of meticulously executed drawings, paintings and mixed media objects. Vulvas, flowers, neurons, cells and a variety of orifices—all examined under her curious microscopic gaze—correspond to an essential and suggestive iconography of the biological, which alludes to the artist herself, to her condition as a woman. In these potential self-portraits, in the self-exploration of uterine landscapes—pioneering for that period in Venezuela—González rediscovers a sensibility regarding gender as well as a fluid beauty that transcends the theoretical rationalism of science and, at the same time, the ideologies of various feminist movements. Gradually, the reconceptualization of a politics of the biological and social body enters into constant dialogue with different thematic registers, giving way to new stories and formal compositions, whether derived from overcoming a “melancholic” modernity or from the introduction of an expressive, spontaneous geometry juxtaposed with subtle inscriptions in an illegible, imaginary language, encoded as textures and organic writing.
González belongs to a generation of artists in Venezuela who had to distance themselves both from new figuration and informalism, as well as from the constructivist kinetic hegemony that dominated the local scene in the 1950s and 60s. Challenges to these trends emerged in the form of art experiences related to conceptualism and to the “new media” of installation and performance. Within this panorama, however, González is an isolated, singular figure who does not belong to any group or categorical trend.
The exhibition Black Holes takes its name from a polyptych of six drawings, in India ink and tempera on handmade paper, produced at the beginning of this millennium. In each one, small ovoid forms increase proportionally at the center of the support. It would seem that this piece marks a transition from her early works, conceived when she was a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, that reference the visual contemplation of feminine anatomy. In addition, her later investigations of cellular division led her to strategies of fragmentation and serialization. These enigmatic orifices fringed with thin organic filaments and, also, the ogive forms, obtained from the intersection of two circles, herald the most productive and mature period of her work. The ogives simultaneously explore cosmic entities and outer space, which then lead to the paradoxes of biological body versus astral universe as antipodes: micro and macro, color and darkness, representation and abstraction.
The repeated operation of making—the thread that connects all of her work—invariably rewrites fragments from previous processes, adjusting them to new formal practices and argumentative principles. Thus, by recreating and reconsidering, by recovering and recapitulating a continuous process in two tempos, she develops the series Neurohilados (2000) and Ovularias (2006), representations of delicate leaf veins, painted in a range of blacks, whites and grays on canvas, or on gourds in earth tones, providing visual metaphors for the vascular, and ultimately astral, network. Las aparecidas unfurls a collection of small canvases, painted in 1998, whose backgrounds have been recently altered to recover them as a sort of ghostly vision. In her immense capacity for creation, González works on different subjects at the same time, giving continuity to an exercise that resumes, at present, methodologies of the past, coinciding with the period of pandemic isolation. This current exhibition gathers a broad repertory of work produced since 2019 that has developed along a heterogenous creative rhizome. As if they were scientific transcriptions or musical scores, Dilatagramas (2015-2023) represents the rhythmic fluctuations and electric pulses of oscillating waves recorded from bodily activity, grounding them in linear patterns. Partially visible in the folds of these dilations, camouflaged in their reticular structure, we can discern the earliest indication of those black holes, vulvas or little pupils. Likewise, the ogives, reminiscent of biological orifices, reappear in more powerful vertical formats titled Neurojivas (2000-2020) and Linojivas (2023), where González superimposes a cartesian geometry in fine lines of organic capillaries.
Body, landscape and cosmos give scale to an implicit trilogy that, through artistic practice, reduces the ontological distance between opposing latitudes. Thus, the series of nocturnal horizons and enigmatic regions of stellar space refer us to telescopic vistas where the holes—now lit—mutate into stars, planets and eclipses, developing an expansive, revelatory geometry in Nacientes y Ponientes (2023). In synch with this search, a previously unseen aspect emerges in her work through a series of pencil studies of apocryphal space imagery and scientific illustrations: the triangles and diagonals of intersecting lines.
During our recent years of confinement, and from another perspective, González compiles an anthology of meticulous drawings in pen, marker, graphite and wax pastels on contact paper, reclaiming her preliminary biological illustrations and incorporating a private cosmography within the set. Corona Roll (2020-2021)—a stunning eleven-meter strip—reinterprets the villainous antagonist of a film-noir as a caricaturized form that evokes the unfathomable human fragility that so many felt when confronting this virus.
The series Tapices (2019-2023)—one of her most outstanding—is another significant investigation where geometric logic operates as a structural vehicle for taking on the idea of traditional weaving. With modules made of identical commercial paint samples, these assemblages create a tight weave where the signs and codes that are so characteristic of her work intervene with a kind of illegible automatic writing. Each cardstock or laminate leaflet is unique, and in horizontal and vertical bands, they come together as a whole in broad multichromatic planes whose flexible geometry, whether seen from afar or up close, conveys the abstraction of a sensitive and expressive narrative. Similarly, planetary projections generate varied weaves that connect us to ancient tapestries, supremely realized in the triptych Retazos (2022), in Tablero (2023) and in the highlighted group of Retablos (2023), where the expanded fragment of a formal construction melds the instinctive rationalism of a lost modernity with the iconography of atavistic, universal signs using a subjective, contemporary vocabulary.
Ruth Auerbach
Caracas, 2023
Translated by Camilo Roldán