Art Centre/South Florida

This will be the chronicle of an experience, as every chronicle in a way, but also an excuse to put a shapeless matter full of tensions and detours and additions of my thoughts into a more or less organised form.

The setting: Miami, a holiday trip with my family and our classical walks along Lincoln Road. The atypical comes now: ArtCentre/SouthFlorida, a place which I already knew but which I had not investigated properly before. Now I took the trouble to enter. I expected something quite ordinary, to see some art pieces hanging on the walls, but instead I found an enormous building thriving with studios where artists created, red and chatted and I could be a witness of all that. I could give the same steps the artist gave, on the same floor, try to imagine the same problems and internal discussions the studio conveyed in its own particular way, since each room was a sphere different from the rest. Each environment bore a different aesthetic and, consequently brought to the mind variegated issues that where intimate to the artist that was working in that space. There was an apparent contradiction in seeing so many different styles brought together in one place, but that is how the place vibrated with its own special tone. You could see colours displayed in all the forms one can imagine, you could see realistic works, collages with strips of newspapers or magazines, paintings with watercolours and much more.

I happened to talk with one of the artists: Babette Herschberger. She was very nice and was willing to discuss my doubts over the place, and to listen my improvised comments on her work. Once in Argentina, I was able to see thanks to the Internet (http://www.babetteherschberger.com/Babette_Herschberger/Home.html) and to the recollection of my memory her work with more critical and attentive eyes.

Babette is a real admirer of colour. I think that working with one or a couple of colours is just as difficult as working with the whole lot of them. How can I convey with the sole use of tonality the intricacy of emotions and the depth of the spirit? Hell of a task! Babette has succeeded at portraying a vast range of emotional states. Joy and melancholy have been imprinted on the canvas thanks to the brilliancy of colours, the suggestive nature of dripping paint, the merging surfaces of colours which are not usually plane but full of texture and delicate variations in hue, depth and volume. Her works have adopted at times rational configurations-especially her construction-pieces-. I also see some influence of Mondrian in the way of dividing the plane in some canvases, but her approach as she says in her statement is intuitive and intuition remains to be the most powerful weapon she has to start a work and to get through it. When is the right moment to stop? She answers: when no action produces a reaction. She is absolutely clear at explaining the way she works. This precision has made me think a lot, since it is the expression of a style - irreplaceable- , that which some day I may achieve at writing (at least I hope so, since style is the true expression of an individuality).

I did not know how to approach this universe of experiences so I tried beginning with the words that I found first, and then trying to unwind the complex ball. English is a language that I love, but for some time I had stopped writing. This chronicle has worked as a new approach to the English words which at first were heavy and difficult to carry in my mouth till they became flexible and friendly for expressing myself.