THE GARDEN

For Matisse, painting a picture meant constructing with colour and line under the maxim of capturing a subjective emotion. I don't like to distinguish between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate it into my painting, he said. His trips to Morocco brought him closer to nature and the visual impressions of paradise. To gardens as a refuge. One of his favourite subjects was the image of the window and, through it, the landscape. In this type of scene another element also came to the fore: the still life on the window sill or on a table. Trays with fruit, pots with plants, vases with flowers. They were his own little paradises.

Like Matisse, Inma Fierro (1985, Seville) has her own gardens and in the still lifes that compose them she expresses her subjective emotions through colour and by means of the type of plant or flower chosen as the protagonist. His ambivalent still lifes oscillate between realism and abstraction, between symbolic content and the emancipation of meanings. They are vanitas but also locus amoenus. They are memento mori but also private edens brimming with life. The works in "The Garden" form a botanical catalogue that combines concepts, they are presented as a projection surface for the artist's impressions as well as an ideal support for chromatic and luminous experiments. Simply copying the objects that make up a still life is not art. The only important thing is to translate the feeling they awaken in oneself, again in the words of the French painter. In these scenes Inma Fierro frees the plants from their model to capture the essential. She simplifies the strokes in order to transmit vitality. Her scenes, despite the flat and perspective-free treatment of the space, speak of places to dwell, of places where to take root, of "islands of peace" (as Satz would say) where to stay and meditate. In "The Inhabited Landscape" the philosopher Carlos Muñoz Gutiérrez argues: The garden is a state of mind that we wish to provoke in the garden. Gardens, places conducive to nurturing inner gardens of desire, fantasy, reflection, truth or oblivion. Thus, each garden requires its own recollection. Each garden has its own spirit. Thus, the series "The Garden" brings together different gardens and each one is a state of mind.

Text: Natalia Alonso Arduengo