Rosa Rubio starts from spirituality, recollection and the creation of a symbolic space embodied in prayer.
Rosa Rubio (Madrid, 1961) wanted the dominant idea in this exhibition at the CAB to come from one of the essential supports of her aesthetic ideology: spirituality, recollection and the erection of a symbolic space embodied in prayer. A concept that drives a double meaning, as a whole that expresses a finished content, as understood by grammar, and as prayer, as the dialogue that we yearn to establish with transcendent supernatural intermediation. As in every sentence, Rubio gives the context a main value in which the signs, codes, internal structure and the different semantic values are decisive. Therefore, it demands from the viewer the necessary stillness, to stop and delve into each of the details that have made up the contemplative stay created for the CAB.
The proposal is based on three central elements that contribute to the rest. The first of them is a mural installation resolved with paper, a deformed scaly artwork, a torn skin destined to contain the orality of the spectator, a container of everything unwritten, even of the unverbalized and the only sensed. A new Wailing Wall in which paper replaces stone and in which emotion and feeling take precedence over pain. The second component acts as a magical vessel, like an isolated tabernacle where a series of figurines reach ex-voto status. The third pillar of the project is determined by Dualidad (Duality), a large videographic projection that relates the entire plastic universe deployed by Rosa Rubio: the omnipresence, the prayer wall and the votive imagery generate a disturbing and dark atmosphere that contrasts with the pure and white surface on which it develops.
Many of the works presented by Rubio for this exhibition share a universal soul with cultures apparently far removed from ours, such as Japanese wabi-sabi that has put the focus on the beauty of imperfection. To its foundation, which by our standards we can qualify as minimalist, is added the fleeting, the transitory towards a fuller and simpler life freed from the weight of the material.
