Paula Garcia | CORPO RUÍDO

Paula Garcia’s art is a radical invitation to physical, mental, and spiritual presence. Her movements aim to confront the forces that dictate the steps of humans in a compulsory guidance which is both vivid and productive, arising from the clanking of iron blended with groans of exhaustion.

What emerges from this is all the energy of an entire army concentrated into the mass of a single body, a paradoxically industrial one, which blossoms and sprouts, transfigured into a thicket of steel. It is a super-body built from the artist’s childhood dreams and terrors; not only is her practice based on action as its central element, it primarily seeks to reflect on what is intrinsic to this action.

Paula has organized a series of creations that investigate the metaphorical and physical concepts represented by magnets, such as attraction and repulsion. She intuitively explores the magnet’s ability to attract specific metals and reflects on the concepts of affinity, identity, and essence. As in metaphysics, this can be compared to the way certain ideas or entities are "naturally attracted" to others, spurring the viewer to contemplate what it means to be or exist in relation to other things.

Her investigation of this relationship is based on her own body, noise, and art, through long-duration performances where she presents herself as a totem, a self-absorbed sculpture. The aesthetic significance of her work is clearly evident, as though it were a painting consisting entirely of heavy, dense, and exhaustive gestures that challenge a body that insists on enduring. Paula evinces her concern for the quality of the viewer’s experience through her presence, direction, and attention, which are clearly apparent at every single second of each of her performances. The artist understands that this artistic place expands her work; it is a material basis with choreographed gestures giving rise to a visual poetry steeped with dramatic power.

Because she understands that art should transform our identity, she also reflects on the act of transmuting the human being’s material organism, the identity disseminated in the body. She therefore searches through art history for elements, concepts, and experiences that contextualize her own artistic practice, and on this basis she develops an ambitious project that probes and manipulates the remnants of a civilization forged in iron and the forces of oppression. Seeing the magnet as more than a mere object, she uses it as a representation of visible and invisible forces: human relationships and socio-political control systems which are revealed in her art through her very particular approach to magnetism.

Her artistic path is an outgrowth of the avant-garde school of performance art. This came about from her deep relationship with MAI – Marina Abramović Institute, an entity with a long-term commitment to its work. Her actions, therefore, involve viewer participation in the process of her artwork, exploring the human body and the element of risk as a form of artistic expression and a means of confronting the conflicts that pervade reality.

In her first solo show, Paula is presenting a selection of works that convey her work as an artist over the last twenty years, alongside experimental actions in the fields of curatorship and production. Through various sorts of records of her performances – photography, video art, and installations – she is showing four of her artworks intensely charged with the energy of a mytho-poetic universe of colossal weavings. In these performances she uses artistic languages to materialize the tension and conflict in the form of a structure covered by palpable and abstract forces. The term that Paula uses to refer to this art field is “Noise Body.”

The sounds that emerge as very present and determining elements lend her work another layer of robustness. Microphones are strategically placed to capture the flow of noises in a system designed to result in sonic art. These sound-art pieces are a blend of noises adorned by the clanging of iron hitting iron; sharp, difficult-to-digest crashing sounds that get under the audience’s skin in the harsh racket of a body that bends and strains under the weight, but remains standing and breathing. This field of sound arises from the clashing between the materials Paula works with, which function as bodies that detonate another body.

The agony of the purple marks, of the stitches sewn onto the artist’s flesh, leads to the understanding of exhaustion and respite as symbols of wholeness. These images have a magnetic effect on the viewers. In contrast to this there are also the moments of rest and nourishment: water, food, the washing away of sweat, these all take on a new meaning and lead us to an imagination that is highly critical of art that does not incline towards risk. All of this reveals the central significance of altered states of consciousness in performance, since it is based on this condition that Paula manages to challenge the bodily limits and create "trance works."

The intensity of her work is grounded in presence, a presence radicalized in total attention to the now. She therefore focuses her attention on brutal work experiences in which, for hours on end, she demands her body’s total dedication to the task. In so doing, she uses the material of the human body itself as both subject and object, a theme and a means of expression.

The rawness, the weight, the use of force transmute the performance into material art. This is when the artist’s efforts take on more ambitious airs, leading to audacious projects, complex in budget and execution, such as Cru/Raw, configuring a moment of maturation. Perhaps the most significant aspect of her work is how she works with, and at, the limit. In various cases it is patently clear that she is persistently aiming to confront extremes: pain, her body, the equipment she uses, experimentalism, and even art itself. Her art is a continuous action that strives to achieve ecstasy through the extrapolation of limits. Along this path, Paula questions the constructions of gender, human strength, and internal and external politics.

She tells us, at every moment, that she is using her own body as a political tool for decentralizing the stable notion we have of corporeality. She shows us that the voice coming from it, combined with the clanging of the iron pieces within the space, is noise. Time becomes a central element, as the artist often challenges conventional perceptions of duration and rhythm. This results in a meditative and active experience for both Paula and the viewers, who are spurred to question established norms about art and aesthetic experience.

In this context, a radical corporality arises through the intersection of at least three factors: precariousness, uncertainty, and risk. In the work Cru/Raw as well as in the works of the Noise Body series, it seems that we are watching an artist who is striving to achieve the impossible and break limits, seeking balance at moments of extreme instability. On a sensory level, the ambivalent relationship between danger and altered perception reveals that any situation pushing the body and senses beyond their routine limits is inherently experienced as risky and dangerous. On the other hand, Paula Garcia demonstrates that exposure to the abyss compels the body to employ its senses in unconventional ways, venturing into the realm of the extraordinary.

Nathália Grilo