The Hypsipyle Verse

“All must have reference to the ensemble of the world, and the compact truth of the world,
There shall be no subject too pronounced
all works shall illustrate the divine law of indirections.
What do you suppose creation is?
What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior?
What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God?
And that there is no God any more divine than Yourself?
And that that is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean?
And that you or any one must approach creations through such laws?”

Walt Whitman

Metaphysics could be understood as a form of knowledge superior to reason, thoroughly intuitive; a form of knowledge assimilated by intellectual intuition, infinitely superior to reason and that which ends up dominating human existence. Aixa Portero’s creations present themselves before us like a process of pure integration of mind, body and soul. This transforms each of her pieces into the resultant fruit borne by the channelling of a superior intuition, unequivocally sharp, and which must be moulded by the very hands of the artist herself.

Portero’s most recent productions are the fruit of a professional and vital pilgrimage which has brought about an awakening. It seems as if upon tearing through one book after another and accumulating knowledge and experience we roam about aimlessly and find that we are restless, but what really happens is that we forge ahead kilometrically into spacetime dimensions deep within the most intimate part of our being. From here, ‘that which stands subsequent to the explanations of nature’, is metaphysics, a doctrine Aristotle approached shrewdly and carefully, as it addresses those things which imply ‘something beyond’ that which can be seen with the naked eye.

Her work reveals a sustained fragility, perhaps exacerbating, a poetics of the instant. It seems as though her desire was to crystalize the fleeting beauty of those trifling things which hold the very secret of life itself. We can thus understand the game which our artist safeguards within the meaningful and symbolic texture of her chrysalides and butterflies. For in them, perhaps, we forever find the most suitable metaphor, existential and universal on both a material and spiritual level, about the road an individual traverses throughout life.

Aixa strives to string meaning together, to freeze time, to crystalize beauty itself. She unravels a warp and weft with the desire to capture the eternal instant with(in) her ‘tiny’ and subtle pages. From there arise her fragile white threads, her delicate and limned roots, her nearly invisible meshes. The beauty of a fallen leaf she pinions (and saves) with needle and thread; a thread which speaks, on the verge of shedding the very meaning she seems to embrace, that it is of the same life, the same beauty, that which seems so evanescent and eternal.

When we read one of her books, Aixa bristles our skin with her boundless sensitivity:

“She dresses those dreams in crystals longing to be a swallow, longing to be a butterfly
(with wounded contours)
To have light wings, below the heavens fly; to emerge submerged,
to climb to the sun on a beam’s luminous ladder”

It is difficult to keep writing when we read and see in her work something so essential, so silent and subtle. It seems that even with our breath we would shatter that delicate instant which she managed to perpetuate for us, and with the slightest tug bring it tumbling down like a house of cards, or fly up into the air like autumn leaves, or that any ill-timed thought or any unwitting word would detonate that marvellous instant which almost all of her works construct.

Her most recent work puts distance between us and the madding crowd, between us and the mundane noise rebounding in our madcap mind. Yet, her works land us in a spot of existential tension, as if we were spanning a tightrope, and if we fall the words would be wiped clean from the pages of our life once and for all… dragging memory down with them, passing through catharsis, reinforcing the poiesis of all her creations, vindicating the need for them to be brought to light.

Technically, out of each material and spiritual trace, the artist makes a new form emerge which sublimates its precursor, giving it, perhaps, a more elevated and superior sense by fusing the remnants of both, which appear to have been discovered in the form itself, in order to synthesize perfection.

Noemí Mendez
Professional of the publishing, cultural and communication sector

1. Poiesis is a Greek term which means ‘creation’ or ‘production’, derived from ποιέω, meaning to ‘make’ or ‘create’. In the Symposium, Plato defines the term ‘poiesis’ as ‘the cause which makes any thing we consider not to be to be’. Every creative process is understood as poiesis. It is a form of knowledge as well as a ludic form: expression does no exclude play.