A Constant Search
Friday, 04 April 2014 11:16
Written by Elisa Ramirez Castañeda
For Gerda, a fragment...
God separated the water from the earth before creating the stars in the firmament. When the earth was still soft, fossils left their imprint there. Then fire and time carved out slices of ravine, and among its folds ran rivers, which scooped out hollows from the rocks. Gerda Hansberg uses her materials in these two ways to show us her perspective. She embeds objects in paper and achieves contemporary fossils, where natural dyes leave their mineral or vegetable stain which, once absorbed, emanate from the moist texture on which they left their mark in color.
She uses the opposite procedure for fabrics. Overlaying slides with tempera and veiling seems to reveal the original strata, as in a landslide. Shapes emerge, polished by flowing water and delineated in the midst of the fog.
Multiple layers reveal traces that suddenly arise, vague figures in a design that is also natural; concealed, they cut through successive levels of a single color explored by the painter with a geologist's obsession or the persistence of rain.
Only half an image appears in the work of Gerda Hansberg, because the viewer must complete the other half with the help of a very distant memory; textures from which the most diverse beings and ancestors emerge out of the corner of the eye when one is half asleep.
Every artist longs to be a contemporary of his origins to gain access, using all his senses, to that initial utopia where vegetable and animal, softness and stone, water and sand coexist, where alliances are still hidden and have yet to be named and discovered, where the years begin to be counted and where the boundaries of our inner beaches begin to be drawn.
For Gerda, a fragment...
God separated the water from the earth before creating the stars in the firmament. When the earth was still soft, fossils left their imprint there. Then fire and time carved out slices of ravine, and among its folds ran rivers, which scooped out hollows from the rocks. Gerda Hansberg uses her materials in these two ways to show us her perspective. She embeds objects in paper and achieves contemporary fossils, where natural dyes leave their mineral or vegetable stain which, once absorbed, emanate from the moist texture on which they left their mark in color.
She uses the opposite procedure for fabrics. Overlaying slides with tempera and veiling seems to reveal the original strata, as in a landslide. Shapes emerge, polished by flowing water and delineated in the midst of the fog.
Multiple layers reveal traces that suddenly arise, vague figures in a design that is also natural; concealed, they cut through successive levels of a single color explored by the painter with a geologist's obsession or the persistence of rain.
Only half an image appears in the work of Gerda Hansberg, because the viewer must complete the other half with the help of a very distant memory; textures from which the most diverse beings and ancestors emerge out of the corner of the eye when one is half asleep.
Every artist longs to be a contemporary of his origins to gain access, using all his senses, to that initial utopia where vegetable and animal, softness and stone, water and sand coexist, where alliances are still hidden and have yet to be named and discovered, where the years begin to be counted and where the boundaries of our inner beaches begin to be drawn.