MARGARITA GARCIA FAURE

Point/Dot. Small, usually circular indication that, through contrast or relief, can be perceived on a surface.

We know that images from the art world are images of the world, and when new ones are created the existent expands, increases.

Creative Innovation is what aesthetics calls this expansion of new images or words, and it can only happen through the use of certain specific languages like color, sound, gesture, word. Each artist chooses and includes into his or her repertoire of ideas the materials, tools and images available, and thus begins to create. When a new word is born, the world expands. That is the challenge that the artist has to face. Creating a new word that originally and uniquely becomes part of the world.

There lies creative innovation. Speaking of the specific reality of a work of art, which is part of its magnitude, Niestche contended that it could always be thought and interpreted in another way…Anyone who looks carefully at the works of Margarita Garcia Faure and reflects on their aesthetics can tell that they stand apart; they are authentic works capable of entering into the world like new words.

For M.G.Faure, unity lies in the dot, which is at the core of her subtle work. She continually appeals to our ability to perceive and to our memory. The dot was the scientific theory and subversive doctrine of Divisionists like Seurat and Signac. Picasso and the Cubist used it to order their expressive and vehement brushstrokes. Kandinsky dealt with it in his theories, praising its richness and formal problematic in his 1926 text Point and Line to Plane, studying it from the exteriority of sign and the interiority of meaning. With Linchenstein, Pop Art took the dot from its maximum degree of abstraction to the most banal representations.

Garcia Faure has digested all the examples and theories available. Her oil paintings, where dots are figure and form, diagram an array of visual strategies.

On backgrounds of randomly chosen vibrant colors, her first paintings with dots were a work in continuom, following the web that her dots created, amusing and losing herself with them as she worked away, letting them take on arbitrary and weightless constellations that took over the venerated background, thus establishing a dialogue between the figure formed by the duly considered and delicately elaborated color and the contrasting background.

Then, like ants, the dots began to describe lines, tracing arbitrary and fanciful paths. Every so often a large circle appears, as if the dots had expanded and grown enormous. Paintings of luminosity and atmospheres that recall typographic structures. Paintings of delimited lines that draw imaginary abstractions.

In her most recent works, the dots describe large shapes of colors that flood the surface, shapes that are read like brushstrokes of paint, of different colors, violently placed and apparently strictly gestural.

In the observation of the work of M.G.F. there are two basic moments that depend on where we stand. Near the canvas, we sense the dots. We follow their intricate paths. We sense the subtle weight of the material, the slowness of the work, the precision of the touch and the drawings that the dots describe. From afar, the place from which we see the whole, we understand the concept: large stains that we know are made slowly with measured dots, but that look like savage strokes flooding the canvas.

These specific nervures gather all experience, all gesture, all form. They reveal the endless freedoms of which this artist is made.

There is always a difference between authentic works of art and other works. It lies not only in the work’s intellectual or technical composition but rather, and crucially, in what makes it a work of art: mainly, it proposes that we find differences. There lies the challenge.

Hugo Petruchansky. Fall, 2004.
Catalogue to the exhibition Gigante, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 2004.

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