Marcela Costa Peuser.
In the Banco Ciudad gallery María Silvia Corcuera presents "Las Protegidas" (The Protégées), a series of "collages" made between 2003 and 2009, which impress both due to their compositional beauty and to the symbolic charge of the elements that compose it
Well-known and contemporary, María Silvia Corcuera is an artist that describes the world that surrounds and moves her. Her latest creation is an objectual and conceptual work, in which nothing is chosen randomly; each constituent has a meaning, and its aesthetics follows a geometry reminiscent of Hlito and Aizemberg. The pieces are common objects, which she resignifies and transforms, keeping their essence alive; that is where its expressive force resides.
According to Delfina Herrera, this exhibition's curator, in Corcuera's work two worlds are intertwined: the purely pictorial and the sociopolitical reality. "They (the protégées) are the ones who watch over a city that mourns its dead; losses caused by the State's neglect", the artist comments. "This series appeared after the peinetones - a popular object that reflects the porteño excesses -, when their sharp teeth gradually became defiant towers of the contemporary city.
In her creative process, Corcuera chooses an object that conveys some meaning to her, a meaning that directs her toward another object or material, thus starting a process of synthesis that, in the end, results in an abstract symbol.
The eye and the city are the protagonists in this series, and a weaved background completes the story.
In one case, the chosen signs were foreign debt bonds and shares from companies such as Acindar, Siam Di Tella or Alpargatas -, as an allegory of an industrial Argentina that never came to exist. In another example, the images of hundreds of anonymous Saints and Virgins, commonly used in bracelets as a symbol of protection.
Countless silk sheets compose the wings of sharp-feathered angels that represent the victims of the Cromañón tragedy.
In "Las Observantes" (The Watchers") she uses small cut-outs in the shape of handkerchiefs, taken from school notebooks, in representation of the mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (women who lost their children and grandchildren to state terrorism during the last Argentinian military coup). In "Oír Dentro del Silencio" (Hearing In the Silence), a succession of handwritten sheets of paper repeat this sentence as a sort of echo, provoking introspection in the audience. This is a unique moment, in which the piece resounds within the spectator in order to achieve its objective.
A citizen of the world - born to a diplomat father and an anthropologist and historian mother -, she was deeply connected to the great pieces of European, Latin American and oriental art. Her artistic education took place alongside renowned figures such as Marta de Llamas, Silvina Cardozo, Víctor Chab and K. Kemble. Corcuera has been working on diverse symbolic repertoires since the 80s.
As a keen observer, both critical and ludic, she assumes her responsibility as an artist by asking us to reflect on our reality and to stop ourselves from losing our bearings amidst the reigning insensibility.