BARBARA CARNIGLIA
La forma de la no forma
Año: 2022-2023

Bárbara Carniglia – Poetics of the uncertain
The certainties in life are so few that, in the understanding of the almost unbearable reality that shows that uncertainty dominates the terrain, man rehearses answers to problems and questions that cover the entire spectrum of the unknown. And even the most creative and convincing can fail. Not to mention perception: the evil genius that Descartes talked about in the 17th century in his Meditations, makes us doubt the veracity of what our senses transmit to us.
Color, shape, movement, abstraction, geometry, are the keys in this new group of works by the plastic artist Bárbara Carniglia. In their varied quantity, all of them propose a kind of planimetric dialogue between figure and background, delimited palettes of full, compact, saturated and bright colors that disable chiaroscuro or the centrifugal gaze outside the margins. The overwhelming “geometric” figures draw attention to the canvas and allow the viewer to step into a space that is familiar to them when they think they recognize rhomboids, circles, triangles and perfect straight lines. However everything is apparent; nothing is what it seems. Cultural conventions and time also modify and educate the gaze, added to a complex psychological mechanism that conditions the way in which we apprehend what we see, synthesize it and adjust it to recognizable formats. If this were not the case, it would be very difficult to move: we need to restore balance, name what we, otherwise, would not be able to think about.
With her works, Bárbara explores a space that requests the observer to spend a few extra seconds to test what he is seeing or thinks he is seeing. The triangles do not build angles, the lines generate paths that are truncated, getting lost in the middle of the canvas without leading to any destination, the circumferences -except in rare cases- are not solidly constituted but, different strokes, allow to find within them, new formations. Something that is pregnant to the eye is the preponderance of the circular figure that, in all cases, organizes the compositions. But it is also evident that each work operates with its own logic of associations between inorganic figures that intertwine revealing a world of altered geometries but geometries nonetheless. It is in the detained observance, in those extra seconds spent watching, the discovery of the lack, the manifestation of the incompleteness, of the prevailing uncertainty. Those seconds are everything: in front of what we “close” and assign labels, the strokes stop and indicate that it is the mind that tries to understand everything to support the infinite lightness of being, paraphrasing Kundera.
The economy of resources is the perfect ally, in this sort of poetics of the uncertain, to say a lot with little. To make room for the plastic materials to be the ones that build impossible figures that empathize with their neighboring partner seeking, in that society of forces, to sustain, complement, help each other resist in a delicate pictorial balance of contrasts and ambiguities.
Lic. María Carolina Baulo, April 2023










