When Pedro Quiñones called me to say he was going to give me one of the works from his most recent personal exhibition at the Azagaya gallery of the Avilanian UNEAC, I never thought that said piece would bring so much unrest to my thoughts, to the point of writing this review and declaring the waiting of its protagonist as a “curse”: the woman with her back turned, naked, mutilated and with a parasol, on top of a pedestal. But I want to approach the matter step by step. As if unravelling a great mystery amidst the most utter chaos.
La espera (2013), a collage by my good friend from Morón, inserts itself within a line of visual experimentation where the minimal gesture and everyday materials acquire a poetic resonance. The work is organised based on a vertical composition in which the figure of a naked woman, with her back turned, partially covered by a parasol, predominates. The silhouette, outlined with firm black strokes on a white background, is supported on a pedestal, alluding both to the condition of a statue and to the fragility of the female body in a situation of contemplation. But that is not all. The matter must acquire another dimension. and, in fact, it does so when one thinks a little more about the symbols and their possible meanings.
Everything would seem to indicate that the waiting is part of a ludic, if somewhat macho, game in which the woman could be part of a somewhat obscene and lascivious gift, prepared for whoever has need of her, and even with a black ribbon as a present or a cord that ties her, forever, to the banal and sexist. The woman as object and merchandise.
But, I ask myself, what is she waiting for?, Or is the waiting rather on the part of the potential client? Be that as it may, everything seems to indicate that it is not something good, because if he mutilates her and places her as an object for sale on a pedestal, destroying her physical freedom to move from place; if he takes away her possibility to show her face without the shame of one who commits a sinful act, almost perjury; then what remains is not a feminine body nor a woman who waits, it is the very figure of the worm-eaten victim.
Quiñones employs mixed media that enrich the surface just as society places justifications for slavery and dishonour. The jute background provides texture and rusticity, counteracting the cleanliness of the linear drawing; the black ribbon tied in a bow at hip level will continue to be in everyone’s eyes an element loaded with the most rancid symbolism—waiting as an act of bondage, of containment, of suspended time—. To this is added the black frame with a yellow fillet, which reinforces the notion of solemnity and, at the same time, highlights the centrepiece in a play of contrasts. Such is life, the high values of society clashing with the lowest and most twisted.
The title La espera is opportune, dialoguing with the posture of the figure, whose passive attitude, covered by the parasol and erect on a pedestal, embodies both mystery and vulnerability. The spectator witnesses a frozen instant, where the erotic, the sculptural and the intimate intersect. Quiñones thus manages to condense into a simple visual gesture a multiple semantic load: waiting, also, as an act of faith, as contained tension, as an interstice between the everyday and the eternal. Like a second before jumping into the desired freedom. Like a, let me breathe, to get the desired impulse.
This 2013 collage, although of small format, reveals the author’s ability to integrate humble materials into a plastic discourse of high poetic suggestion. The piece transcends the anecdotal and inscribes itself in a contemporary language where the female body, stripped of superfluous ornaments, becomes a metaphor for permanence and oppression.
