Maria Eiper or the iconography of the secret

 

by Carlos Delgado

Historian and Critic of Art

 

  The paintings of María Eiper play with the stimulus of the present and the memory. This tension between the two temporary fields plunges her work in the field of polysemic significances, as the artist is not looking for a starting point that becomes an immutable reference. On the contrary each plastic construction, and through various techniques and procedures, paves the way for the suggestion and the evocation of the interrogation.

 

  A first insight into the various options on which María Eiper investigates at the present time (and divided into three series, “Keys”, “Venus” and “Impressions”) immediately provokes the desire to dig into the ultimate meaning of her iconography. However, the painter, who has defined her work as “a personal diary of images”, seeks in the viewer “an open interpretation, inviting them to find their own connotations depending on their sensibilities and experiences”, beyond the veiled autobiographical component that only the author whole knows.

 

 

The memory of a buried key

 

  The Key is a recurring motive in the works of María Eiper, that adheres to the pictorial surface like something more than a simple object-trouvé. In fact the artist creates these keys individually giving them their appearance of an object that owns its own memory adhered in their oxidized disused character. Their meaning is neutralized when they are put on the pictorial surface. The keys then become the expression of a symbol whose semantic connotations come from the pictorial context of the composition of the entire piece.

 

  The first of these connotations and perhaps the most appealing comes from their locations on the canvas. We find these keys in a space whose textures and atmospheres evoke with great lyricism a sub aqueous environment. Nevertheless, the most decisive effect is consumed in its group compositions; aligned, dispersed, compact or hidden. These keys establish suggestive relationships to each other that can form themselves like the gravitational axis of the picture or to generate compositional rhythm.

 

  The artistic transfiguration of the daily life object (as it is the key) arises in the work of María Eiper through double conceptual experimentation. On the one hand, the recovery of the vitality of the object through the faithful shape of its appearance and on the other, the alteration of its traditional meaning by means of concealment strategies and compositional order.

 

  The contrast between the naturalism of the key, the heavy thread inclusion, the diverse material densities and the select tonal palette, takes us finally towards evocative scopes where the association of all these components are juxtaposed and interlaced on the same surface contributing to a particular physical and semantic meaning.

 

  As a whole, the work is not entirely representational nor entirely abstract – the idea of the deep sea where the keys are buried dissolves in the beauty of the tonal and textural transitions to give the impression of a swaying movement establishing the position of the key like the end of a search. The key in this instance is slowing revealing all its underlying meanings.

 

 

Venus

 

  But we now raise to the surface to take air.  There on the delicate rhythm of the waves and like a conjuring act, many times represented in the History of Art, the Venus goddess is born from transparent, blue water of the Mediterranean.  And if we change our glance higher, we will discover that in a Solar System baptized by names of masculine Gods, the celestial body more brilliant of all will receive the name of this goddess arisen from the sea.

 

  The topography of the planet Venus appears among the volumes that stand out in the works of María Eiper belonging to this series: the exultant materiality, full of nuances, characterize an expanding telluric morphology. But do not try to find in these works a direct translation from what we see, because as the artist says, “I like Venus as an excuse to express my temper, my love for colours, and the search for new forms of expression.” In this series, colour, subject matter and light offers the viewer a vigorous action that has been held in abeyance, a metamorphosis where time has stood still and left petrified matter in the attempt of a powerful eruption. Thus, the forms will mesh, overlap and slide some over others, projecting them toward three dimensions without reaching independence from the original support.

 

  As we are see, the paintings of María Eiper do not describe the world we see when we open our eyes; Its forms suggest many things but are not possible to be identified firmly. This is something that will be made more evident in the following series.

 

 

Impressions

 

  The technical complexity of the pictures of Maria Eiper is not gratuitous.  It responds, essentially, to an expressive desire that finds in each material and used procedure the most suitable technique to channel it.  And if in the previous series the artist broke the natural flat state of the canvas projecting it towards the field of the observer, these series of works explores the possibilities of the ‘gratagge’ leaving the fingerprints of the immediacy. On having scratched the pictorial surface, created with different materials, such as sand and marble dust, the way of the sign is opened. In this way she introduces her iconography of the secret, the evocative doubt, in a support covered with a chromatism where the painter reaches a high degree of refinement and lyricism.