Balderas

‘I ride on dreams, unnecessary and broken;
Deluded prisoner of this everyday jungle.
And like dry leaf, wandering in the wind,
Imaginary flight on concrete stories…’

Rockdrigo González. 

Painting is also displacement and a sensitive experience. María Portilla´s work is the result of drifting within a space and the pull, like that of a magnet, which attracts any events that may occur. A journey made over several years, between her home and studio allowed her to become thoroughly familiar with the Plaza de la Ciudadela and the neighborhood dynamics that embody the streets. The dancing, the games of conquian, the courting and flirting that takes place in the shadows of the gardens, homeless groups appropriating the public space and rendering it domestic. Recognised as an apparently calm space, but this tranquility is interrupted at certain times of day, and always accompanied by the turbulent background noises of the city.

This is how Portilla constructs her sound-paintings. Small images to reinterpret situations taken from her mapping of La Ciudadela , they are born from a visual start point and head towards their sonorous complements . As if within the pictorial surface, the atmospheric background that fosters them is unfolded. For the artist, generating a relation between the richness of sounds and image, is a way of enunciating and expanding the form of painting. To translate a space and sound dynamic that challenges the everyday; to imagine the stories of Balderas that, on a daily basis, spectrally rise, disperse and once again disappear.

Violeta Celis

Curator.