Pax Natura
In Aixa Portero’s work, a wide creative expression has always been maintained, with the most diverse artistic issues interacting to achieve a superior status. Thus, drawings and painting have been succeeded by other plastic positions. She is a born maker, manipulator of matter, dominator of the constituent elements and, therefore, her exercise does not remain in minimal compositional circumstances but rather she dominates the enclaves of a personal sculpture where the form triggers the best aesthetic situations. . She is also a brave and determined interventionist of spaces; Her installations are not mere arguments looking for easy empathy, but are raised from wise conceptual positions that are defined in very successful interventionist enclaves. At the same time, Aixa Portero, with a clear-sighted creative facility, makes use of all these compositional registers to create a totalitarian work where everything is capable of coming together in a definitive and illuminating position where all the intervening elements occupy their structural space forming a definitive whole. Everything, without discarding the new technologies, to which he resorts when the argument of the work demands it in that structural desire of work open to everything and with everything to support that concept of very broad compositional structure.
As for the development of this artist’s work, she has never been within modest aesthetic intentions; just the opposite; her sustaining base has been a powerful social conscience product of strong experiences that have generated a passionate creative position. In that conceptual segment we saw her at the beginning of her career; an artist who, then, developed a work of marked meaning, with stark arguments around a fairly strong existential problem. She, however, made a subtle statement about a desperate search for peace that would temper the existing harshness and achieve a definitive strengthening of human rights. They were works with a strong autobiographical dimension, which unraveled clear experiential positions.
Aixa Portero’s work is, moreover, pregnant with poetic effluvia; an essential, intimate poetry that leaves some aftertastes of spirituality where everything that we sense has a place, that which comes to be –also what cannot be because it is alien to what it is– and that opens the prospects of some feelings where reality it loses its representative borders and silences its discourse; a discourse that is, in turn, possible because it leaves open a guiding thread from which to pull and make the invisible visible. In this sense, Aixa’s work looks at nature, at the essence of a truth that illuminates the elusive face of the impossible. In her works appear trees, nests, birds, forests that trap with their trickster branches, rocks that break off and leave the eternal presumption of signs like fossils of an entity against the current.
Very worthy of note throughout the career of this artist has been the constant concern for the human entity related to culture, where the social is combined with that spirit that hides behind the cultural development of peoples. A constant reference in her work has been her book; a book that is the axis of everything; container and content, absence and presence; intimate duality that makes us cross paths where the essence of everything circulates. The book in Aixa’s work is a railway junction where the train of knowledge stops, that which contains reality itself and that which is not. Books like silent temples sheltering a universe of sensations, emotions, roots that support the nature of existence, that which unifies the old cultural unity and opens the unpredictable horizons of truth.
In the successive works and series of this artist –Poiesis, The Roots of Flight, Glyphs Natura, Raíz Pajaro and Piedra Raíz, among others– one finds the genesis of an artistic consciousness that is not limited to the successful expression of an aesthetic reality and but it is found in a universe of truths, those that keep in suspense a creation based on a very well thought out concept from a cultured, meditated position, based on knowledge, experience and the existential development of a committed life.
I have always been interested in the work of Aixa Portero, that step forward that is appreciated because her pieces are not mere representative situations but rather, with many successful compositional registers, envelop the viewer in a commitment that makes them intervene and become an accomplice of the intention of the artist. In addition, her work has such a broad and ecumenical spirit that it commands general interest and understanding. Thus, in Belarus, where she was the first Spaniard to exhibit at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in that country; now in Malaga, with this exhibition that will turn the spaces of La Coracha into a wide stage where the vast and passionate iconography of Aixa is present so that the expectant soul of the observer is pinched by that mediate wink that each work poses; or, in the Alhambra, where she has been invited by exception to the magical spaces that house the history and the spell of that mythical Granada that remained eternally, so that her scrutinizing, brave and unique gaze rescues all the essence that there takes shelter, Aixa’s work subscribes to a content cry of life; a beautiful song of peace for the world, a melodious song with lyrics – its pieces, its sculptures, its installations, those forests full of books or those birds that enclose a particular mythology are nothing more than beautiful artistic poems – that describe peace, the world, culture, the human being, existence.
As I wrote not long ago referring to the work of this artist, I can only end with those words: “When art and life maintain conflicting dialectics, when society permanently suggests questionable states, Aixa Portero’s work opens up beautiful perspectives that they keep dreaming”.
Bernardo Palomo
CAC MÁLAGA PRESENTS THE VIRTUAL TOUR OF THE PAX NATURA EXHIBITION IN AIXA PORTERO WITH THE COLLABORATION OF PHOTOGRAPHER JOSÉ LUIS GUTIÉRREZ
The CAC Málaga shows the first virtual tour of the CAC Málaga – La Coracha exhibition hall, carried out in collaboration with the photographer from Málaga, José Luis Gutiérrez. This virtual tour offers viewers the opportunity to go online through the Pax Natura exhibition by Malaga-born artist Aixa Portero, which could be seen in the CAC Málaga – La Coracha exhibition hall until September 25.
The virtual tour of the Pax Natura exhibition of the artist Aixa Portero, curated by Almudena Ríos, shows a selection of the most important series of Aixa Portero’s artistic career made up of almost twenty works, 248 pieces including painting, photography, drawing, sculpture and installation of different formats that covers the period from 2015 to the present. Including in the areas of points of interest, sounds, videos, external links, to appreciate all the details of the exhibited works and ensure that the visitor has a totally immersive experience.
Within the virtual tour they will be able to complete their experience by delving into the relative information of each one of the works as well as a commented visit made by the artist of 13:13 minutes in which she selects the most representative works of the sample .
The viewer will be able to delve into the works of Aixa Portero that reflect on peace from nature, referring to the most intrinsic part of peace itself, showing its interior and exterior nature, from its origin.
José Luis Gutiérrez is a photographer from Malaga whose studio develops its activity in the field of commercial and advertising photography, in which he has carried out many commissions in very different fields of photography, such as food, fashion, architecture and interior design, advertising campaigns , high-quality 360º virtual visits and, especially, reproduction of works of art and photography for museums.
His work has been recognized with awards such as the Echo Gold Award, the Imán de Plata Award and the Agrippina Award for Advertising in the category of advertising photography.
The virtual tour will be available until the end of the year.
Tour of the “Pax Natura” Exhibition by the artist Aixa Portero at the CAC in Malaga 2021-2022
Guided tour of the Pax Natura exhibition with the artist Aixa Portero
Exhibition “Pax Natura”, CAC La Coracha, Contemporary Art Center of Malaga, Spain.
Exhibitions, Pax Naturaview
