XABIER SAENZ DE GORBEA

Painting is like looking. It involves having to make decisions and carry out a physical, sensory, mental and psychic exercise. You have to choose what and how to do it, just as when observing you must place yourself before the questions that the work introduces before your eyes. One color is followed by another and after the first layer the next one is produced.

​

A process of transparent concealment and illuminating moments, seeing the superimposition and placement of some tones and others. This is what happens in the work of Barbara Stammel (1960) that shows becoming and transit. The discovery that permeabilizes accumulation. The resistance to the passage of time. A sum of media that evokes realization and invites you to relive the process.

​

Stammel takes a course at Arteleku in 1993 and has lived in Getaria since 1995. The German creator works obsessively with her body and drastically evokes the body of inconcrete beings that inhabit the ductus of the pictorial and in the breath of a forceful and energetic expression. He takes on the breath of distortion and obsessively paints a series of heads looking straight ahead.

​

In essence, every work of art has something of a self-portrait, since it offers a perspective of whoever has conceived and painted it. Common place that in the case of the German creator has overtones of certainty. However, the faces she paints do not represent specific people with names and surnames, but rather are the consequence of the author's dialogue with reality and fiction, representation and pictorial gesture.

​

And above all, they offer a perennial dialogue between what is manifested on the outside and what can be perceived from the inside. A type of work whose genre begins in 1992. Since then, painting faces has been his theme.

​

Many other creators have focused on the experience of their image. Without going too far there is the pulse with and against time of Roman Opalka (1931) that never ceases to be captured photographically at the end of his paintings. Conceptual gesture that always has the same conditions and leaves the evolutionary residue of physicality. Who also does it is Esther Ferrer who creates her Book of faces, dualities of herself that reveal the past year.

​

For Stammel, each head becomes a character to deal with and mysteriously coexist with. No intimate and delicate approach. All of them are unusually huge. They are not bigger because the author uses the measurements of her arms to be able to encompass them and move them better. Despite its size, it is not lost in details and synthesizes. The background is uniform and focuses on the tensions and impulses of the material. He paints some beings whose proportions are about six times greater than the natural ones. They are faces that look and faces that we see. One does not know if they are or exist, but we feel their delirious proximity.

​

Immersed by their resounding evidence, they propose the clamor of their enigmas and the interrogation of bodily limits whose showcase barely contains the splendor of matter and plunges into psychic discharges. Products of a will, whose destiny seems delirious, obsessive and penetrating. The longer you are in front of these gazes, the more you see and the better you go deeper. Concerns that come out with disturbing violence and with the calm passivity of bodies devoid of movement.

​

Silences full of chromatic thunder that offer the pulse of stains whose gestures have the virtue of mapping the wild interstices of each portrait. They approach each other. However, they are not uniform, but offer the possibility of prolonging the perception by capturing their differences.

​

The deformation and intensification of the bodily organs are reminiscent of 1960s Baselitz. But Stammel's paintings have the counterpoint of the eyes whose reflections are transparent winks. Hypnotic power of retinas that play the important role of magnetizing serenity. They are like wells of clear water that oppose the magma of the flesh.

​

With focuses and blurs, objectivities and subjectivities, the artist places us between the raw material and the objective presence of the contour. Each figure always occupies the center and is at the same distance. If it weren't for the deformities, the compositions are reminiscent of the minimalist structures of Thomas Ruff's large passport photos, showing, for example, his classmates at the Dusseldorf academy.

​

The inner masses sometimes look like swollen flesh, inhabited by excesses and full of problems. Stammel sees deep. He flees from easy harmonies and offers an over-motivated action. It goes beyond appearances and provokes the estrangement of personal interpretation. No sensory passivity, but the active assessment of each reason.