Rachel Garrard

SHIFTING PERCEPTIONS
Feb 6, 2024

This exhibition brings together the most recent body of work by British artist Rachel Garrard, who has explored the field of abstraction from a point of view that intertwines the natural world, perception, and imagination. Departing from a series that she has been working on for a long time, and in which she applies layers and layers of pigments from rocks and minerals directly on the canvas, the artist displays a selection of paintings where abstract universes emerge. The use of stone materials seeks to link the telluric dimension with perception and consciousness; or in other words: the outside world with the inner landscapes.

In this sense, the geometry, shapes and colors of the paintings—reminiscent of dreamlike spaces, impossible architectures, ghostly entities, and indecipherable symbols—function as a point of intersection of the visible and the invisible. For this reason, these are works that have no iconographic referent or precise meaning. On the contrary, their metaphysical and luminous quality seeks to propitiate a synesthetic sensorial experience. This is directly related to Garrard's commitment to endorse artistic creation as a form of knowledge, experience and reflection that goes beyond the realm of language.

In the same direction, it is possible to recognize in several of these works an encrypted writing, configured by the artist over the years. These signs and signals, of an apparently esoteric nature, do not, however, have an unequivocal meaning, but consist of a visual writing that invites to be deciphered by intuition. Following the Mexican writer Salvador Elizondo, we could say that the artist puts into action that "faculty that we still do not know, paradoxically, if it is the one that allows us to read without understanding or to understand without reading".

In addition to the paintings distributed in the main galleries, the show includes a room where a series of clay sculptures, perched on top of pedestals, coexist with a work by the sound creator and experimental musician Ralph Killhertz. The sustained tension of this audio track, in dialogue with Garrard's pieces, seeks to generate an immersive experience that addresses the totality of the human sensorium. Precisely, once the exhibition is over, this experience of shifting perception invites us to go out and observe the world with a renewed look, with a shift of perception whose nature and depth will depend on each visitor.

- Esteban King Álvarez