|
|||||||||||
|
| Virtual exhibitions |
|
||||
| See works | |
| Ileana Mulet |
| Taking by the hand by angels and demons, she finds in her way dreamt images she then expresses on wide spaces, where she evades dimensions in order to group, placing one on top of the other, solid stones, walls, streets, stairs, towers, large windows, arcs, belfries and, sometimes, human and animal forms, opening spaces as if she were bringing to the Earth the infinite dimension of the sky. In her paintings ―as frequently happens with music―, space and time have found a balance. Also color, which reflects the warm atmosphere that illuminates her landscapes and the burning fire she handles with her paintbrush. Ileana Mulet has revealed in her plastic creation (finally!) the myth of the Trinity ―three different people (the Russian artist Marc Chagal, the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and the French composer Pierre Boulez) and one only true goddess: she. That is the way I see, so prodigious, this symbiosis that defines the nature of her poetic source. In a field full of magic and mystery, where everything seemed already discovered, she resorts to other images to complete the plastic richness that appears in the world of contemporary Cuban painting.
Harold Gramatges Havana City. March, 2006. ...Neruda asked, “Air in the air? And the man, where is he?” Ileana answers, “The man is in the city, he is in the house; he is protected by the doors”. And we see that, except for a few exceptions, in all of her painting there is the human creature. Either a balloon or also looking through a window ―because there can not be doors without windows; windows are complementary to doors―, and the creature is there, no matter whether kidnapped, assaulted, or slept, slept in the warmth of the landscape. Those pieces of sky, those blue spaces that appear in almost of her paintings, evoke futurism, hope, confidence, which are not only green, but we can see it in the city too, and in Ileana Mulet. It makes no sense taking so much; the interesting thing is overcoming these doors to enjoy what Ileana Mulet does in this counterpoint of the concrete and the imagining. Words pronounced during the exhibition Puertas [Doors] at La Acacia art gallery by the writer and poet Mr. César López, awarded the National Prize of Literature, in 2003. Ileana Mulet is a woman who combines her eagerness to battle with a vital poetry she expresses through poems, paintings, decorations and gestures. When I met her, during a lesson at “San Alejandro”, ―where I had arrived with the purpose of provisionally occupy the position of professor―, I noticed the strength and sensuality, boldness and sensibility in her —a very young student back then. Even at that time, she had a particular personality and charm that she has kept and reflected, as a mark of her spirit and her perceptions, in the somewhat oneiric landscapes she produces, in the spaces she hedonistically turns into metaphors through vegetation, in clothes designs that bring fantasy in the natural signs of the body, and in that sort of memory “dance” in itself where she mixes and mixes up textures, “bittersweet” colors, well-known places and silhouettes of people sketched with a crude solution and graceful strokes. Apollo-like and Dionysian at the same time, lively and almost half way between the “tessitura” of some “Sunday artists” and that of the “Fauves”, she reflects a personal lyricism that may take shape not only on canvas, but also in the making of verses, in the settings that show her taste, a certain ability to foster the friendly dialog and the party, and even that other creation of hers —Claudia—, where she could join the “magic of anatomy” and “the magic of dance”. Manuel López Oliva Visual Poetry Maybe this could be the great secret of her work: an absorbed painting, silent, almost whispering, talking to us in a low voice, as if she were talking to herself... Like having a dialog with yourself below your breath, but stating realities like form and color, or rather looking around with her eyes of poet and even beyond time. In Iliana Mulet’s work there is, obviously, a great dose of silence. We all take part in the silence given off by the objects and people that her city landscapes exude. A silence that invites us to think, to revive the dialog previously established by the artist with the subjects. A conversation almost exclusively made of looks that evolve with time, focusing over and over again on our city ―Havana. A look that knows how to be made richer with what it sees. Now (...) she opens Puertas [Doors], where she has combined all the different meaning this magic word could have ―welcomes, good-byes, mysteries, joys, sorrows, memories, surprises, life...―, because it is at the same time an artistic game that allows her dealing with a thousand crazy ideas that also strike the spectators in their everyday struggle. The paradoxes of everyday life are behind those doors we can now go through. Always washed by a monotonic light, without shrillness ―a light that sometimes we do not know where it comes from, but is always present in her paintings―, the pieces of this artist reach the mystic of an underground world y the passing of time, as well as those objects from modern times turned into fetishes with a highly poetic and metaphoric content. In order to make the most “taste” of Iliana Mulet’s painting, you have to take space into consideration. And not only space, but also the body matter, the sign, the sound and the silence they all produce, the memory of the reality they raise. Her demand for a body sign space shows her belief in painting and her respect for it as means to express the thinking and the outstanding experiences of this author. Iliana really believes in what she does. And as a poet, she does not only pour her thinking and feelings into her paintings and cardboards, but also in put them into words, into literary statements, because a poet fights using all means, through all means. In order to fit her fate to painting, she organizes a plastic space with a personal code. Without giving up the sensuality and the sense ecstasy reflected in her works, the artist talks about the way time stands still in the old buildings her eyes can see during her travels through the city. Convents, clocks, churches, colonial houses represent eclectic sources integrated into her formal conceptions, and where the codes from intertextual games, the distribution of light in focal areas that emphasize the singular atmosphere of her creations and those phantasmagoric effects she reaches through a skillful use of color and texture emerge. These are personal landscapes, light receptacles that allow her to build a space dwelled by color spots where the skilful use of the paintbrush and the hand gesture always become evident. I said before that in order to “taste” Iliana Mulet’s painting you have to take space into consideration, and I corroborate that. Space need to be taken into consideration, as well as everything it happens on it: its cardinal limits, the verticality or horizontality of its development, the surface vibration, the central spaces, full of color sounds or empty, static pauses; the tonal rests, in the fashion of contemporary music’s sudden silences; the serial subjects, a complex, passionate dialectics she establishes with herself in the first place and hen with the public. This dialectics causes tension between up and down; purifying rise, materialized fall, between right and left, opposition, invasion, between oil and acrylic ―the natural and the manufactured... In it, this Cuban artist reveals inner landscapes, a poetry that vibrates in her veins and comes out qualified by her tones. Toni Piñera, 2003 |
| CUBARTE 2006 |