At the Isolina Arbulu Art Gallery in Marbella, it is possible these days to enjoy an unusual, heterodox exhibition, pontificated by talent, revelation and awareness for transcending the usual paths of art. The exhibition is entitled Stardust: A Universal Poem and is made up of drawings, sculptures, paintings and complex installations that provoke all kinds of emotions, some atavistic, others unusual, most of them transgressive. The exhibition is signed by Aixa Portero de la Torre (1975) from Malaga, one of the most revealing and pontifical artists in Spanish contemporary art.
Before Marbella, Aixa Portero de la Torre had just exhibited with Enrique Brinkmann (Málaga, 1938), an artist whose work is exhibited at the MoMA in New York, at the Reina Sofía in Madrid and in the most coveted private art collections. The exhibition, entitled Diálogos: Aixa Portero & Enrique Brinkmann, was on show at the Ateneo de Málaga until last October and verbalised clearly and abstractly that strange process by which art seeks the mirror of reality and reality, in turn, has done nothing else in history but imitate art.
The Malaga artist Aixa Portero, who has recently been awarded the Andalusian Flag for the Arts, uses different materials to create her works of art. In her collection entitled El Canto del Árbol, the artist and professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Granada uses wire, tree branches, organic cotton and artificial hair. The sensations produced by Portero's work is a singular return to nature, a closeness, an approximation to the origins, together with a piercing fragility that on the one hand protects us and on the other threatens us. In this lyrical reconstruction, as she herself describes it, the feathered leaf, the bird root, the stone branch are elements that bring us closer to a world where, far from any disturbance, we feel a special protection.
Aixa Portero's work does not have an ephemeral character, however much the materials she uses have a tendency to disappear. Aixa Portero's installations seek to fill a void, they fill us, they fill us up, they offer us a solid, tangible, real volume.
Another collection by Aixa Portero whose materiality gives us a special sensation was LibrEs Plumas. In it, Aixa Portero once again proposed a duality, a double path, two paths, one to the right and the other to the left. And whichever one we take will lead us to another question mark. In this series, moreover, she reveals drawing and painting, disciplines hitherto neglected in her work. And he does so with remarkable confidence, with unusual strength. This mastery is also evident in other series that in recent months have consumed the artist's hours of work and concentration, and which once again disturb us when we contemplate the direction taken by the roots she traces on the paper, the textures, their shadows and glazes.
