Symbolic pages that are these stones, maps of the soul in which are also found the bodily experience of contact with the water of the sea and the pebbles that were once divertimento, intimacy and memory and that have gone on gradually to expand into that kind of incredible ‘library’ that they are now. Like little notes piled up on themselves, these stones sculpted by water and time produce a strange new sensation in inviting us to decipher their messages and to attribute to whom they belong (if having once been written they are not already ours for always) those words, so eloquent in their silence.
Sometime, someday, we have all written our names in that special place that it was a tree, a wall, a leaf. Paloma Navares converts that innocent, intimate and ordinary act of spontaneously writing on some chance support into a potent exercise of memory, a tribute to those who had the courage to share their deepest fears, their recollections, their melancholy and even the words with which they wrote their farewell. Rewritten for themselves in an astonishingly intimate anonymous performance, these same words that now flicker over stones trace the stations of that journey into memory whose guide are the words of Paul Celan, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Alfonsina Storni, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Camille Claudel, Cesare Pavese, Charles Baudelaire, Albert Camus, Antonin Artaud, Franz Kafka, Carl Jung and so many others.

Pilar Ribal

A vertical cuboid and inside it at the back the image of a portion of the seashore in movement.

In this piece Paloma Navares plays with contraries: a container and the uncontainable, the secret and the visible, absence and presence.

The spectator leans forward, looks, discovers; is involved. This way of addressing the work presupposes desire, a gaze eroticized by knowledge and curiosity. In the interior the foam rises to cover the pebbles set in the sand, metaphor of the individual. Fine strands of seaweed evoke the sea bottom, the secret, the unconscious. We hear the rhythm of the water, we sense by its absence the smell of the sea. The foam inundates everything and then recedes. It will return in a continuous loop… the passing of time.

If Boris Vian used the sea foam as a subtle metaphor of the unfolding sequence of the days, Navares situates it in a space-time of absences. A place of lack, loaded with meanings.

Valentín Ferrero