Text by Raffaella Salato on the occasion of Evita Andújar’s exhibition “Verdad Muda.”
A continuous narrative that proceeds by snapshots, a tale made up of still images (or, as they say nowadays, “screenshots”) that are assembled into a complex, variegated and ever-evolving puzzle: this is the feminine universe of Evita Andújar, the undisputed protagonist of the poetics of the Andalusian artist, who always works poised – but with masterful mastery of intention and gesture – on the ridge that runs between figuration and abstraction.
Verdad Muda
The exhibition titled ‘Verdad muda’ brings together a series of paintings from the ‘Stolen Selfie’ cycle, inspired by the paradox of our hyper-technologized society, overexposed to a continuous flow of images and information that, however, are often devoid of real content. The identities that social networks obsessively send back to us are only pale simulacra of a reality that few, by now, bother to penetrate and know: so here Andújar distorts and erases these surface individualities with the declared aim of provoking an alternative reflection, of shifting the focus from appearance to substance.
Evita’s women, as she herself has repeatedly explained, are both her alter-ego and archetypes of contemporary femininity, encompassing on the one hand the reflection of the artist’s many nuances, and on the other paradigmatic images of today’s Woman, immersed in a complex, restless, rutilant reality that forces her to be – to paraphrase Pirandello – “one, none and a hundred thousand,” in perpetual dialectic with the mutability of human relationships and the fleetingness of existence.
The centrality of women
This sense of elusiveness and impermanence, from which none of us is immune, is translated on Evita’s canvases by evidently transfiguring the leading element, she, the woman: although undeniably the center of the scene, as happens in the portrait tradition, the female figure loses her identity, which often liquefies in the domination of the pictorial matter over the image (as in ‘Stolen Selfie 69 or Brezza’), sometimes deliberately conceals or subtracts herself (e.g., in ‘Stolen Selfie 45 or Hide What You Are Not’), and sometimes, finally, she doubles up in partial reflections of herself that never return a defined identikit (‘Stolen Selfie 56 or In Tomorrow’s White’).
The end result, in the eyes of the viewer, is that of a suspended narrative, crystallized in a fragment of the present that provides no answers, in which the loneliness of the woman – in Andújar’s paintings there are never any side characters, not even in the background – becomes a symbol and personification of the estrangement of today’s world. In this sense, the parallel with the women of Edward Hopper, the master of 20th-century American Realism, comes almost naturally: it is as if Evita’s canvases, which have an almost cinematic flavor, of stills from a film shot indoors, narrate our personal crisis, our inherent loneliness. Looking at her paintings has an almost cathartic effect: it is like looking at ourselves reflected inside a mirror that shows us as we are, offering us an opportunity to understand ourselves better in our existential condition.
composed and controlled subterranean restlessness
Yet there is always an element of hope in the artist’s canvases, a tension between physical space, time and emotions, a spark that causes us to question the “what” and the “why.” the accuracy of the rendering of certain details in the setting (depicting mostly bourgeois domestic environments), the never casual use of light and color (the intense blues, the bright reds, the flashing whites), the poses or gestures of the figures that never appear passively static but rather traversed by a composed and controlled subterranean restlessness, suggest to us a story that has yet to be written, an “other” key that emerges through the work’s different levels of interpretation, a verdad muda that presses inexorably for voice.
Text by Raffaella Salato on the occasion of Evita Andújar’s exhibition “Verdad Muda.”
Discover the artworks by Evita Andújar
