Sólo el mar en los ojos, 2004
Upon returning from a stay in the United States in the early 1980s, Soledad Sevilla incorporated the language of installation into her work. Rather than seeing this as separate from her painting, it became a necessary extension to it, lending her installations a subtle pictorial character. In all of them, light plays an important role, as do titles, narratives and poetry. With a clear organic dimension, Sevilla creates abstract structures that evoke the elements or natural places, while alerting us to the distress and cyclical transformations they experience over time. When the artist presented this work at the Sala Amós Salvador in Logroño in 2004, she explained:
‘I want to explain [...] my long process of personal enchantment with a small coastal town in the province of Huelva, El Rompido, a natural place located at the mouth of the River Piedras, in the municipalities of Lepe and Cartaya. It is formed by a fourteen-kilometre-long spit of sand created by the sediments of the River Guadiana. It began life in 1755, when the great Lisbon earthquake produced an immense tidal wave that modified the entire Portuguese coastline and that of the Andalusian Atlantic. It was then that the spit began to form with a width of a little less than one kilometre that frequently “broke”, with the various branches of the River Piedras forming new mouths to the sea. [...]
‘It’s a mysterious silence. Everything there is marked by imagination and fantasy, and that emotional connection with the landscape triggers an urge to create and engage in the slow process of contemplating the relationships between the images presented by natural phenomena and the abstraction of the structures that underpin the mental processes of creation. Rather than trying to transfer the complex configuration of the former to the codes of expression of the latter, what I intend is to explore their mutual relationship and create works that demonstrate the tension between the two worlds. [...]
‘The impact of place, light, time and the five senses form the vehicle that allows me to find that reference. At the same time, my fascination with miniscule things and the organic evolution of nature is reflected in the piece Solo el mar en los ojos.’
Technical details
- Original title:
- Sólo el mar en los ojos
- Registration number:
- 3614
- Artist:
- Sevilla, Soledad
- Date created:
- 2004
- Date acquired:
- 2009
- Fonds:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium
- Object type:
- Installation
- Media:
- Wood, polystyrene and resin
- Dimensions:
- 350 x 1200 cm aprox (height x width)
- Credits:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium. Gift of the artist
- Copyright:
- © Soledad Sevilla, VEGAP, Barcelona
- It has accessibility resources:
- No
The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.
For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.
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