To Paint in Breaststroke

The sensitivity of the time encourages everyone, through their actions and habits, to adhere with others. A mysterious aura that makes us share dreams and diverse gazes in an unconscious way.

Elena Núñez is attentive to the propensity of things. She is also moved by feelings, affections, moods, and other non-rational dimensions that allow her work to manifest in everyday life. In the effervescence of the everyday, the intensity of the present enables the expression of a continuous readjustment. A resistance to established convictions that incite a desire for elaboration.

Elena Núñez presents her work with a sense framed as a question: ¿En qué puedo pensar ahora? (What can I think about now?). Neuroscience tells us that the brain pumps thoughts just as the heart pumps blood or the lungs oxygen. It’s its function. Indeed, the persistence in her work and a trained curiosity lead her to propagate in her studio and mind, various proposals for sustained attention. Options her brain throws out in order to live through a life situation. Proposals that lead her to adopt methodological consequences as a processual phenomenon. A space and time that allow the improbable to be installed as a cause of desire. Far from strategic positions or calculated operations, Elena Núñez does not intend to craft a discourse, nor is she willing to feed any type of inertia that could block her process in the studio. In her work, she is more concerned with how a process is determined in order to offer a result, than with imagining or predetermining what that result will be. 

She is a collector of signs—books, references, objects, or images with which she acquires some type of bond. She tries to expand the potential of these signs and hopes something will awaken between them: a friction, a detail, or any symptom that fine-tunes a vibration. Here, the artist acts as a radar.

In reality, what she seeks is an escape, to avoid everything from closing. Her drawings and paintings are often in operations of transference, in displacements that refer more to life and experience than to representation. The touch and her, interpret breath and awareness, always in search of a desire that, even for an instant, manages to slip into the folds of space. Elena Núñez is a painter who approaches each painting as if it were the usable surface of a home. She sharpens the edges of each work and tackles the space by drawing corridors, using adhesive tape enclosures she betrays. Among geometries and forms—soft or hard—the event makes its way within semi-open outlines, with or without retracing. These profiles result from an accumulative process, where the different layers of paint create a stratigraphy that is almost archaeological.

The artist invites us to create a choreography that enhances the interaction between the exhibition space and her work. Her painting considers a viewer who moves in and out of one of the four spatial distances that anthropologist Edward T. Hall defined in his proxemic theory, such as “intimate distance,” with a proximity margin of fifteen to forty-five centimeters. A spatial range destined for the foreground, transporting us to the land of aerial views and a topographic survey that undoubtedly offers the “high definition” of reality itself. Where the observer can appreciate the diction of her painting and trace the different layers the work accumulates, sometimes as thin as that of an amphibian.

Elena Núñez is a painter who is concerned with keeping the temperature of her paintings under control while highlighting in them an apparent transience, in response to a process constantly in motion. We perceive this in titles like “Transporting Yellow”, where the artist indicates that something is being. Direct and somewhat raw paintings, traits of a painting that does not look back. The profusion of details reveals the process and produces an organic whole. A kind of vegetative life where the content of truth can be perceived through the most insignificant details of the work. We see this in “Previous Demands”, a body splashed with relevant nuances that peek out from the white background of the work to create a field of its own, a light that reflects in the black paint and transforms as an event. The blue trims and shows a kind of anonymous message struggling to define itself. Forms that resist to remain serene within their cells. Oversized words and letters that distort one another, waiting to insert themselves into the viewer’s desire. 

The exhibition gathers work created through an intense relational vocation. Astrologer Silvia Neira tells us that relational intelligence is in harmony with our feminine side. A sensitivity that understands covering, surrounding, adding, empathizing, or how we can respond to any life situation. Elena Núñez trusts in her feminine nature—the glue that allows her to register more, resonate better, and escape sameness. An artist who experiences the process of otherness, while her work reveals that painting embraces.

José Ramón Amondarain
Artist

With the support of