Carolina Carubin: No Place for the Weak
Artist Text
“You must consume yourself in your own flames;
How do you intend to renew yourself without
having been ash before!" Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885)
I like to think that art enriches people's lives. Art as a battlefield where creative energies of all kinds are fed back: some destroy, others build, but in the synergy between them, the result is always superior even when it compromises the deepest and sometimes painful emotions. Many artists choose to immerse themselves in these turbulent waters and investigate from within, generate a productive space of transmutation and resilience and transform the unspeakable into matter. Carolina Carubin is one of them.
Constructing and edifying are actions that for the artist – she ́s an architect - represent the assimilation of everyday, familiar processes, through the production of a type of work that is closely related to the recurring immediacy of her environment. The search for all her aesthetics and creative line is set by the use of materialities that echo a conceptual axis that Carolina Carubín has been working silently from her first paintings, until establishing herself in the field of textiles from where she can get the work leave the plane, gathering volume, taking up space. They are pieces of a visceral, organic abstraction, full of insinuations that allow us to intuit routes, rivers, veins, scars that are printed on the elegant and subtle papers thanks to the vital pressure of the
engraving. Pioneering series such as Corriendo Velos (Sliding veils, 2015) or Cortezas (Cortex, 2018), bring us a barely sketched panorama of what would come later. Small models that contain sewed stories, gently held but that in their apparent fragility, stage contrasts of forces and a certain disturbing violence. It is in the Pequeños Mundos (Small Worlds, 2019) series where the circle, a perfect figure that organizes and amalgamates, enables the latent danger represented by the steel edges behind an aesthetically structured facade.
But it is perhaps in Carolina's last works where an increasingly forceful synthesis is produced because the idea is so clear that the matter conspires to make it present. The Transformare (2020) series combines wood, papers, ropes, wires, all of them interwoven in a loving, fraternal dance that interrelates them to the point of not being able to unlink them either visually or literally. Full of references to an emotional reality of its own, this kind of self- portrait unfolds in a variety of pieces that have the particularity of emphasizing that complementary relationship that the artist establishes
between the knots that hold and the knots that entangle. Because it is all part of a dialectical process where what is contained is sometimes trapped by its own container, but many other times, that container is necessary as a condition of possibility of its being. Carolina debates and defines the structure of her works in the midst of that permanent tension to hold without retaining, to restore leaving the least possible trace of the tear, to embrace with her armor without hurting with its forcefulness.
Matter lives in Carolina Carubin ́s work. Her objects and sculptures condense a life story that tells us about the passions that every human being must deal with. In her personal case, the artist chooses to make those emotional whirlwinds plagued by the uncertainty of immediacy and sudden changes, a communion with stable and solid foundations, those that only love can build. Her work is friendly even when it keeps within it a visible struggle to harmonize what it seeks to impose, a work whose frankness uses minimal resources for maximum results, where the firmness of the smallest, the imperceptible, manages to became protagonist when the spectator's gaze enters the channels opened by the artist, specially designed to allow it to penetrate.
Art, such as life, s transited with a bittersweet flavor; it is perhaps one of the places where human emotions that do not enable rationalization are best expressed. For Carolina, art is the way to understand the impossible, to give to it an apprehensible form. It is then an act of absolute freedom and exponential will, to acquire the tools that provide the strength to approach the abysses themselves and face them, to take fears by the hand and live with them. In each work, Carolina reveals her struggle as a woman and as an artist; in art she reinvents herself and with it, she reinvents her environment. In each work, Carolina is consumed in her flames and reborn from her ashes.
Lic. María Carolina Baulo
September 2020