'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 that life produces in me and the way I translate it into my painting, he said. His travels to Morocco brought him closer to nature and to paradisiacal visual impressions. To gardens as a refuge. One of his favorite themes was the image of the window and, through it, the landscape. In this type of scenes another element also acquired prominence: the still life on the windowsill of the room itself or on a table. Trays with fruit, flower pots with plants, vases with flowers. They were their 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. Her still lifes, ambivalent, 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” make up 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 light experiments. Copying only the objects that make up a still life is not art. The only important thing is to translate the feeling that they awaken in oneself, again these are 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. His settings, despite the flat and perspective-less treatment of space, speak of places in which to dwell, of places in which to create roots, of “islands of peace” (as Satz would say) in which to stay and meditate. In “The Inhabited Landscape” the philosopher Carlos Muñoz Gutiérrez maintains: The garden is a state of mind that we wish to provoke in the garden. Gardens, places conducive to feeding interior gardens of desire, fantasy, reflection, truth or oblivion. Thus, each garden requires its own contemplation. 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