ANA PÉREZ VENTURA. Études

13/09/2019

Ana Pérez Ventura: painting as a musical chest

By Fátima Otero

The idea of lost time is a central premise in the plastic creations of Ana Pérez Ventura, an artist from Compostela, resident in Paris (1981). Just as in a Proussian novel she longs for its flow, so she tries to trap it. Her artistic vocabulary is related to questions derived from specific art. As a starting point she takes the construction through small graphic signs that are meticulously printed. They are plots of lines, dots arranged in an aesthetic function that come out of a way of working that is in itself a concept in her work.

 Pérez Ventura´s choices are direct and affective because they respond to her professional facet as a renowned pianist. Her creations crystallize corporal, physical and mental gestures around her experience at the piano, searching for material, technical and ethical perfection. Although her discourse is conceptual, not reflecting the world or bearing witness to social reality, she does promote the visualization and understanding of the musical process by offering a cognitive possibility for the viewer.  

All her artistic proposal derives from the action of immortalizing the insistent sessions as a virtuoso instrumentalist in the pictorial plane. The essay, always through subtle minimalist gestures, is printed in lasting projects that carry the common denominator of the musical thread. She manages to make Ariadne´s string vibrate in the sense that we almost feel the melodies or musical notes sound because they are the ones that weave intense series of repeated rhythms, registers and pulsations produced as litanies of patience and monastic religiosity. The instrumental technique not only runs parallel to her artistic facet but walks in unison with it. Ana translates that persistent and tenacious daily action that, not being tangible for the spectator, she insists on extolling and treasuring as a leitmotiv. 

Her Notages series responds to the well-known exercise of the composer Hanon regarding his piano practices in order to improve the speed, precision and agility of the pianist. The author translates musical forms into pictorial language, in this case by sliding rows of staggered holes into melodic lines.  All the physical effort of repetitive musical practice is retained. The discourse of the exhibition in the Metro gallery of Compostela links the paintings as if they were sheet music. The result is a minimalist installation that emulates more than the emotion that the music produced in Kandinsky´s work, the tedious work of extensive practice sessions of the virtuoso pianist in 60 exercises.

In this series she uses the punch with which she undulates orderly holes on the concise wooden support, but which in their contact and order seem to vibrate as if driven by the musical breeze. She subtly lets us guess a constant pulse, rhythmic and melodic twists. The synthetic use of forms dazzles us. 

The musical practice, with the repetition of patterns as a means of learning, inspires the Ètudes series. Rotating rhythmic sequence that comes from the same precision and monotony, in this case the result of painting a same turn that generates infinite layers of spatial depth. The result emanates pleasurable emotional responses. Each canvas intoxicates us as participants in a very spiritual totum revolutum. Defying the immateriality of music, Ana Pérez has managed to trap it via plastic form. It is a challenge to try to pursue musical immateriality. As a challenge, it has not only been hunted, but it has been seized in the form of writing. This series, which engulfs circles and circles of white paint on a blue background, is one of the creator´s emotional responses to the musical pathos turned into a very voluptuous, subtle and suggestive plastic sequence. 

Her artistic references refer to the minimalist experience of Agnes Martin or other creators such as Ignacio Uriarte, and nonetheless assume the sensations and effects that the colours, lines or dots produce in human psychology, as observed by Kandinsky or Paul Klee trying to capture musical movement via colour or superimposing forms. The artist resolves her doubts, fears, insecurities in attractive up and down linear registers or spirals in transit. This has been immortalized in rhythmic, suggested and random drawing actions in space. 

The Neumas series is dressed in grace and beauty, even more so as it is drawn on light paper, with layers and layers of white and black dots like piano keys arranged in regulated variations, which suggest a kind of tapestry that manages to make Chopin´s scores almost dance and vibrate. Punctual minimum gestures follow non-transferable sighing or inhaling rhythms and arrhythmias as if they were vital blows. They speak to us of inner beats, of chance, but no less of fantasy and leisurely games. Very graphic and enigmatic signs that precisely contain high doses of poetry in their discreet essentiality, because they ascend to hope and turn or fall like tears of evasion.  They magnetize and make you think.

Any of her already known and valued works resolved through the process, resemble suggestive scores in a kind of connected and activated canvasses based on spatial occupations, capture the calm, long hours, spatial duration and flow of the music. The backgrounds of her series open infinitely and homogeneously to receive only abstractions. It is up to us to read these utopian pieces.  

 Ana Pérez hopes that music will never be erased from memory, knowing that it is created from the immaterial and impalpable. She invites us not only to share but also not to spare any time in daily tasks, that asset that is increasingly scarce and that she invites us to treasure it for a fuller life.