THE LOST SIGHT EYES

THIS IS NOT A GRANDMOTHER

“Verbatim, photographs are objects. Nevertheless they seduce because in a world captured by photographic relics they seem likewise to have the category ofobjets trouves, accidental fragments of the world.”[1] It is probably this, what at first puzzles the spectator ofDenise Buraye’s work, who in this new exploration stage of her creative career, has taken photographs as the ruling matter in her paintings. The photographic images emerge not as a forced reference of reality, but as poetic and suggestive signs -as fragments of the world- of symbolic identity, which give her painting a dynamical sense and turn it into an event of multiple interpretations.

 

But, asphotographs are clouds of fantasy as well asinformation capsules,[2]in Buraye’s recent work, there is an extreme poetic value added to a powerful symbolic sense: those family album shots must have a history and their own origin which come forth to inspire the personal recollection (and sometimes the collective memory), but it is evident in the re-creationthe artistic intention to generate a new chronicle: a new beginning and a new end.

Buraye undertakes old photographs -not antique ones- and sets them with some deliberate order and with pictorial texts which support the images.Then, arises the grandmother, the dog (bitch) and the dancer, and various possible lectures: the grandmother could be the dancer and the dancer the dog (bitch) and the dog (bitch) the grandmother and viceversa. Or none anything, or each something else.

 

The intensity (warmth) of the observer’s imagination and certainly, its personal associations come then into consideration. However the combination of real and imaginary references examines more than one memory (understood, also, as the facilitator of the recollection, nostalgia and even melancholy): the artist’s, the spectator’s, the collective and the picture’s own.

 

Buraye’s re-creation process is gently elaborated, finely sewn, typically feminine, yet in it appears undeniably certain irony: “I see three images -states the artist- the grandmother, the dog (bitch) and the dancer. As I illustrate to what end this images are so important in my recent work, Magritte always comes on account. He said: what we see painted is not what it is, it is its representation. When we see This is not a pipe I think of the image, the concept and how the artist proclaimed his surroundings.”

 

The paintings of Buraye are therefore, a personal view in aid of many views. Moreover, they disclose a possible poetic dream[3]  in her work, as her paintings assume the original image -the shot/photograph- to animate it in its own psychic and poetic value. “The subtlety of a novelty -says Bachelard- revitalizes origins, encourages and duplicates the happiness of wondering.

[1] Sontang, Susan. Sobre la Fotografia, Editorial Suramericana, Tercera Edicion, 1980,Buenos Aires, Argentina.

[2] Sontang,Susan. (Op.Cit.)

[3]Bachelard, Gaston. LA poetica de la Ensoñacion, Brevarios del Fondo de Cultura Economica,primera edicion en español, FCE, Mexico, 1982.