The other emptiness.
About Out of Time of Virginia Guilisasti
By Pedro Donoso
In general, daily existence is not presented to us as a free and original construction, but rather it is based on a set of acts, displacements and recurrent forgetfulness that precipitate without much tranquility. Faced with the persistence of this uncontrolled daily routine, visual artist Virginia Guilisasti (Chillán 1979) has been looking for a way to experience another method of conducting time and embracing every moment in which she settles down to develop her work as an artist. Her exhibition Destiempo (Out of time) now shares the results.
“ During three months, I integrated breathing exercises (meditation) into my habits. Three times a day, I would isolate myself and concentrate for 15 minutes. It wasn't easy to escape from what I was doing to find the moment. But once I did, I had to focus, turn off thoughts and be present.”
To take refuge in these personal moments, Virginia elaborated a modality of work that began by separating herself from productive time and concentrating on breathing. Inhaling and exhaling, the artist reaches a neutral state where thoughts pass slowly until they disappear. Then, without words, immersed in a moment “out of time”, Virginia turns that silence into a mirror. There she has looked at herself again before approaching these personal exercises.
Out of time is made up of different series of practices carried out after her breathing sessions. One of them is composed by the gesture of tracing stripes on the surface of felt paper covered with a white base. The images emerge from the lower layers, without having to be prepared. Rather, it is a matter of emptying. “Each constructed image carries a name and is created under the vague perception of a previously lived moment”, explains Virginia. The previous emptiness prepares the hand gesture. Where do these images come from? Who finds them? The hand or the eye?
In another of her series, Virginia chases the image of a companion animal that lives with her, her dog Lara. Without pausing, she draws with thick lines of black ink the animal's changing postures. That pet armed with a light hand shows unexpected angles, just as Muybridge's photography managed to separate time lapses in an animal's ride. In this case, drawing out of time reaches what is interspersed between time and our perception. Realism is static because it draws with thought. This loose exercise, on the other hand, settles in those unexpected instants that float between each instant. When the mind is empty, everything pushes towards an encounter.
The exhibition is completed with the “protective shields”, small sculptural pieces assembled with pieces of bark that the artist collects with a personal idea of protecting the intimate. The work, we might think, is scattered on the floor like pieces of a puzzle that we have yet to assemble. Suddenly, after months of unnoticed waiting, the hand selects, stores and also discovers. “Depending on the sizes and textures of each chosen stick,” Virginia explains, ”I was building their shapes.” Like the signs of an unknown alphabet scattered across the field, these pieces make up a script. Another of the exercises on display emerges from the ground. It is a series of words die-cut on sheets of felt paper; compositions that repeat a word or phrase. “They were words that came spontaneously to my mind. I cut them out repeatedly and then buried them.” This process recorded on video presents in the room the burial of those sheets that now come back to life, from one void to the other, out of time, as if they were resurrected to say something that, in the end, has no longer become personal.
