La ceremonia

Four Nude Environments

The exhibition is divided into four environments: at first, we find The Ceremony (2015-2016) and Stolen Life (2015). The Ceremony is an installation that presents eighteen small-format drawings in the form of a mosaic, framed by a rectangle of black paint that emulates the edges of a film still. The combined view summarizes the artist´s position in relation to the reading of images and her formal strategy of transforming them. Almost all of them have been selected from films by directors such as Saura or Camus, who create a type of cinema that is highly symbolic and metaphorical. Inside of this mural is the film still that gives its name to the exhibition: Disparando (Shooting), which belongs to The Ceremony, by Claude Chabrol. That woman with a shotgun in her hand, who combines a brave stance with a dejected attitude, sums up the temperament of many of Marta Beltrán’s female characters, in which unreason and decision coexist.

Facing this mural, emerge four drawings of one of her emblematic series: A Stolen Life, whose title is inspired by the 1946 film by Curtis Bernhardt, with Bette Davis as the leading actress. In the film, identity issues are placed in the front line: the double, reality and fiction … Bette Davis plays two twin sisters in love with the same man. These pieces, with carefully finished backgrounds and a realistic and detailed facture, are good examples of her primary interest in creating an image archive based on classical cinema. She analyzes it as one of our main sources of learning about the traditional women models, of the behaviors that are socially accepted or condemned.

One of the key installations is La Pantalla (The Screen) (2016). This huge mural, conceived as a panoramic cinema screen framed by a false painted curtain, “returns to the cinema the images that the artist stole from them”; proposing a static cinematographic session that explores the differences between the appreciation of cinema and that of painting, opening communication channels between both disciplines. In fact, the bench in front of the mural forces the viewer to sit down and stop to observe the small details of a static film.

To “occupy” that enormous eight-meter long rectangle, Marta has conceived six new drawings, which abandon the detail and the picturesque tone of previous series and opt for a more energetic and expressionist line, focused on unveiling the psychology of the scenes and of the chosen characters. The six roles, maintained, relate in a forced way to the characters of the different stories, locked in a delirious screen of patches that ends up generating a scene with the air of a nightmarish neighbor’s house, a monstrous set only unified by the drawn curtain.

On the other hand, in Las Orantes (2016) the minimalist papers are exhibited, as we have already mentioned, as pieces of a disintegrated and multiform identity in which two repeated characters stand out: the young widow and the woman wounded in a stoning, both recurring images in the iconographic investigation of the artist.

And finally, we entered the workshop, in the space we have called The Closed Room (2016), and which has a special meaning for Marta as a representation of her both her studio and the mental place from which she works. The installation allows for different experiences: on the one hand, it works as an environment in which to discover, on two tables and on the floor, piled up unfinished drawings that dialogue with a mural of color images with cinematographic references. We also find some framed drawings that remind us of home furnishings and contrast with the purity and minimalism of the rest of the surroundings. And then two pieces belonging to the series Little Women (2015), which allow the general public, familiar with the popular movie of Cukor, to better understand the strategy of symbolic deformation that Marta executes. Finally, a particularly relevant piece of this space that was also conceived as a meeting place for workshops is a retro slide show on one of the walls. Discrete and in color, are the precise frames that inspired each of the pieces of the project, inviting the public to make connections and put together the pairs.

Three subjective axes cross in The Ceremony. On the one hand, the investigation of the image of women in our cultural imaginary, analyzing the cinematographic language and the clichés that perpetuate. Secondly, a reflection on the historical confinement (physical and psychological) of women in the private sphere of the home and its variants (from seclusion to “a room of one’s own”). And finally, the firm commitment to new modes of knowledge based on intuition, the wisdom of the body and the exchange of emotions that allow us to imagine new ways of relating in society, situating cooperation, collaboration and care over of competition, individual achievements and economic growth.

As I assimilate the project, it may be for me, the Chapel Hall, in its imperfection and humility, in its stripped-down abandonment of loose papers scattered by the high walls that swallow them, that best expresses one of the virtues of Marta Beltrán’s work: show what cannot be told, using a kind of emotional graphic writing. And here I will quote María Zambrano: “There are things that cannot be said, and it is true. But what cannot be said is what has to be written. […] The writer leaves his solitude to communicate the secret” [1].

In the same way, Marta Beltrán “only leaves her solitude to draw the secrets”.

Heads of long hair and forced postures float orphaned, without scenography, exposed to the bath of supernatural light that penetrates through the window, generating in the visitor a certain dizziness by the curious dance of desires and unconnected longings.

Susana Blas

Exhibition Curator

Madrid, December 2016

[1] María Zambrano, Hacia un saber sobre el alma (1950) Por qué se escribe.