I was made aware from early in life of the disappearance of a little girl, my aunt, who died at age eleven She became an image in my mind that is there to this day. The image includes phrases, anecdotes, her little coffin in a pantheon covered with wilted cut flowers, her little fur coat that never fit me well, her smiles, her gesture and her eyes staring at me from photographs. Her name is my name. I never knew her but I think I knew her, an image etched in my mind, like what happens with historical characters, movie stars or popular idols like Princess Di. People think they know them and they become a part of their lives. As on a TV screen left unattended in the corner of a dark room images circulate in my mind. Some keep returning, they recall a touch, they stir emotions, they seem to have a voice of their own. They become a frontal presence that needs to be rescued from the unpredictable flow of appearance and disappearance.
Dark Series
I start on black paper, the color of the invisible, and search my way through the surface with a white line. The drawing starts to expand in different directions and images appear of another time in which an imaginary tango takes place. I thus project my "argentineness" not as an exotic offering for tourists interested in the eroticism of a dance but as a mystery of what remains and is transformed in the light and dark spaces of my mind.
"Las Meninas" Velasquez Fabric Paintings
I went to Las Meninas with"feminine materials:” fabric and thread, and a curiosity about the women who are represented there. On the one hand there is the beautiful and fragile princess who embodies the wishes of all girls to become princesses and the other as a counterpoint, the deformed dwarf, persecutory figure, with clenched teeth and jaw jutting in space with an expression that is hard to forget. I identified with the princess and I felt compassion for the hideous dwarf. As always I felt everything through my body. I embroidered the verses of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío that came to my mind while working.
"The princess is sad, what ails the princess. Sighs escape from her strawberry mouth."
For Argentines who live at the other end of the world in relation to their origins, Spain was "the mother country." We imitated their culture, speak their language, profess their religion. In the painting time stands still. The princess will always be beautiful and never grow up, she lives forever in the framed reality of the canvas reflected in the mirror of the Prado Museum and the endless distortions of reproductions.