I approach Vanesa Amenabar´s worked summoned, prima facie, for its aesthetic appeal. I am attracted by the materiality of the paper, the subtlety of the finish of the forms, a familiar and charismatic figuration that generates automatic empathy, the reference to nature, full colors that unify the structure of the work and the small details that make each piece a unique story within a set of works that have related conceptual brushstrokes. The artist tells me: “My art is a connection that occurs between my hands, the materiality of the paper, the scalpel, scissors, needles and threads and my soliloquies. I materialize on paper something that has not yet been thought of. Paper is a language. It is to feel its texture with the reliefs in each design. Listen to the sound it generates with the movement according to its weight. The play of colors and visual effects that are generated, their aroma according to the inks used to dye them”. And using that paper as a material that offers the condition of the creative possibility, I begin to delve into the works because I sense that they keep an overcoming story between cuts, pigments and textures. 

Born in Mendoza, with a professional training that combines business with design, Vanesa Amenabar approaches the arts from a very young age, traveling the field of music, social photography and clothing and interior design. But after moving to Buenos Aires more than a decade ago, after living many years in Rio Negro and Neuquén, her work highlight a drastic turn that leads her to connect with paper, a material support that determines her choices within the visual arts since it is the axis that regulates doing; everything starts from paper. Some of her works in recent years set the pace for a sustained course over time. Each series, with its particularities, displays a range of technical possibilities of folding, fretwork, cuts with a scalpel, experimentation with pigments and dyeing of various papers of several weights and sizes, arranged on racks. 

Despabílate Amor (Unravel Love, 2019) brings us a universe of colored wings. Absolute synthesis, nothing seems to indicate that it is necessary to look beyond what the figuration proposes and that is reaffirmed in the titles. And it is because the objective is set there, to guide the viewer to a place where reflection is the product of an a posteriori exercise: connecting with beauty, the stamp of elegance, the vitality of a story that hides behind a universe of not always entirely happy experiences, it is a manifest intention. It is well known that artists have an ace up their sleeve in front of all the rest of the mortals and it related with being able to sublimate in their work stormy issues that affect us in a varied way but that not all of us can solve, reconverting in an experience that enriches us, even when it is based on a traumatic experience. There are no conceptual details in sight that would only take away from the viewer the possibility of exercising their own association in the face of what they see in a work. In these works there is a wing beat, a change of course, a letting go and rethinking the strategy to survive; flying is one of them. The paper comes out of the plane; it has shape, volume, body, three-dimensionality. The horizons are expanding, starting towards an uncertain but comforting destiny in its potentiality that makes it grow. 

The series A Flor de Piel (On the Skin, 2020) reaffirms this search. The titles once again play with words that link the work with a perhaps somewhat “naive” reading. However, when the viewer manages to connect with what is behind the veil of the apparent, it is difficult to stop seeing it and return to the previous stage. A series that the artist defines as a kind of «connection between the texture of the skin of the work and that of our own«. Nature manifests itself in flowers of pregnant colors that reveal an obsessive and exquisite work in the treatment of a material as fragile as it is resistant and noble as paper, turned into a support for intense emotionalities that are manifested in each interweaving of its colored fibers.  

However, it is the series Volver a Ser, Volver a Hacer (To be Again, to do Again, 2020) the one that brings me the closest to being able to unveil that mystery behind the female names that define each mask. The masks have always been and are used, historically, to accompany man in a metamorphosis from where it is possible to access to say and do what is alien to us – because we are representing others – or what is absolutely our own and that we consciously or unconsciously silence. The mask protects those who wear it, it gives them a legal framework similar to that of the game where rules are established and within that pact, everything that those rules contemplate makes the actions valid. The mask represents and sometimes presents and that is why it is a perfect ally to delve into mysterious passageways. But it is in that carelessness in front of what the mask is supposed to hide, where the keys to open the secret doors slide. A single thing cannot hide the mask but on the contrary, it is reaffirmed by the omission of the rest of the face: the gaze. It is that entry into the soul, paraphrasing the poets, that remains unveiled, which allows us to register the trace of humanity that hides behind. Vanesa’s masks frame and adorn feminine gazes that become part of the work together with the act of looking at whoever could wear them. 

I would like to close this tour with a work that represents for me, a synthesis of Vanesa Amenabar’s work. Rosa (Rose, 2020) is a wall installation where a huge amount of small flowers in a palette summed up in white, mink and pale pink, unfold forming a quasi-romantic framework. In each one of them a precious treatment is discovered, detained, as if an act of meditation guided the artist’s practice and in a moment of solitude and infinite patience, she prepares to elaborate a multitude of petals that become flowers with leaves and buds that take up space. However, its colors are of a nostalgic pastel, they summon more to a winter than to a spring, they have something marbled, artificial, typical of what emulates something that is not real. A paradise that is not all that is apparent, a melancholic background from which pain and sadness are reworked and transformed into a visual discourse more edifying than anguish. Vanesa’s work travels that curious passage from where, from the entrails of the silent winter where everything is gestated, new rebirths take place that originally needed pain and darkness to later see the light. 

Lic. María Carolina Baulo, March 2021