On Irma Lacorte's "Rigodon"

This exhibit of pencil drawings opens at 6pm on January 17, 2008 at Art Informal, 277 Connecticut St., Greenhills, San Juan.

i

combinatoria

The series is an invitation to storytelling. All by itself one image – a spoon or an ampersand, for instance – strikes as insight. Taken together, the nine frames form a puzzle. But it is a plural puzzle, informed by all the permutations of arrangement and movement within the eye: moving in line as a row or column, or in the zigzags of pairs, or in circles along the manifold possibilities of jumbling the tiles.

Pieced together every which way, the nine images generate stories. The frames extend the dance between artist and medium to involve the whimsy and memory of the artviewer, the artseeker. In the end – or insofar as such a project allows finality – the viewer becomes co-maker.

 

ii

hydra

The heart as a vessel contains dream, object, sign. Live with the ligaments of memory, the series traces the contours of a moment, the texture of fleeting experience.

The images flash in mid-throb. But one image does recur, the headless runner. Rid of much vertical baggage – vanity among them, we may conjecture – she leaps every which way, freed from direction or the need for intent. Concern being the least of her concerns, we find, in the wake of her sprints, our own narratives told and retold, passed on, and thrown away. Lost. Yet always running: our stories, in all ways, regenerating.

iii

wika

Speech, in the form of questions, springs from this decapitation. Which story is expendable? Which reading is least valid? Which emotion is of the least significance? Whose life is least worth living? This device of the nine frames takes in all perspectives. Yet, with grace, it refrains from boxing them in. Instead, with contagious exuberance, the frames multiply and deepen human experience in a single visual gesture.

In a primal way, the series offers us idiom. Arbitrary and framed, it carves a language off our lives. The series is a myriad face. Each cardioglyph is a mouth.