El Sol es la Fuente by Clara de Tezanos

There is a speed that is typical of Clara. It is a voracious and provocative speed. Playful. A speed in which gestating implies placing the body in desire, in fire, in permanent transformation. Her artistic experimentation originates from photography. Light, the primordial medium of her matter, remains the essential element of her work. But, now, her cosmogonic heart floods, captivated in the infinite devotion of her mystery and, as if by a mystical call, she plunges into the deep understanding of the knowledge in which the sun is the source.

The experience of feeling the mystery of the Divine light necessarily transforms her. And in that search for meanings of truth that lead her to certainty, she redefines the physical space that she inhabits, her bonds, the way in which she travels around the weight of her body, her spirit, her speed, her gaze. Clara begins a devout pilgrimage in search of the source, which also transfigures her gestating action. The spirit of the Divine light manifests and is represented.

The sun is the source is an exhibition that begins like this. It was born as a search to manifest the Divine in a game-investigation in which the artist breaks away, from an insubordinate gesture, with the two-dimensionality of the image. She disarms a camera and begins the creation of The Transmutation Machines, multiple astronomical objects made of wood, leatherette, glass and other elements, with the function of manifesting in a ritual of mystical foundation. A procession in praise of the sun, inside an ancient sacred building, where the objects activate the fullness of their spiritual power in celebration of the Divine glory through their light manifestation in movement.

Some of these objects are preserved and keep their original ritual presence. Others are fragmented and transformed by the artist. From there are born the Votive Lamps, sun amulets, which in her mobile gesture show the desire to propitiate a space for joy, amazement, and the ecstasy of being and her surroundings. They are rays of God, they are Divine instruments.

Without measuring an exact time, Whispers, the multidimensional mural composed of sundials, works as an invitation to observe how time is translated into light, from the lightness of its composition of wood and litmus acrylic. Variation of forms, touched by the gesture of light, emit ethereal figures of color, which reflect on the cycles of life, the eternal and the ephemeral, the permanently changing. That, from its duality, in its essence of being light and being shadow, occur in balance, like flashes of the spirit of divine poetry.

Clumsy drawing of the eternal deal with that transition from light to darkness. And, in that nocturnal infinity where the absence of the glare of the sun exists, Clara offers us new conditions of coexistence and relationship on our perception of the dimension of the universe. Sky mirror in elliptical translation fulfills a similar function from its figure, an elliptical map that emulates the rotation of the earth around the sun. As an ancient gesture of using the lagoons to see the celestial bodies, she places a black mirror on it so that it reflects the sky, so the expansion of the stars in the universe can be observed. Giving space for the cosmogonic story to recover its poetic force, that one's self can perceive his own condition in the midst of that coarseness. See the soul. Take learning with humility.

Theories of Fludd, Kepler and Newton are mirror maps as a tribute to thinkers of the sun who accompany Clara on her journey.  People who, in other times, like her, understood that the cosmos is a living consciousness.

In this way, The Source is the Sun becomes an investigation in permanent search and mutation of its light artifacts. Those who do not yearn for perfection, but to be in their essence, deep representations of the Divine spirit, in communion with the rhythm that the artist impregnates them, from a deeply loving and playful gestation.

The title, from the beginning, speaks to us of her own need to move like a mantra. That is, enunciate from the very exercise of the voice like a whisper in infinite repetition, like a prayer. A title-prayer that extends as an invitation to find the right frequency in our voice, the one that lights the votive lamp and teaches us that, as it is above, it is also below, and that the sun exists within each one of us. 

Andrea Irene Dardón, Curator

Guatemala, March 2022