When I wrote the text for Francisca Mompó's exhibition at the Gallery Fandos in Valencia, I was interested in analyzing her work according to her historic sensitiveness and placing her work in parallel to some of her perhaps most specific sources.
Through the present exhibition, which holds a longer period, there have been found out the coherence between the sources and the bi-polarity her search relies on, and that is what I would like to emphasize.
Nowadays, in order to understand any artistic movement, it proves relevant to make evident the rupture that has occurred with, immediate preceding movements or the nondefined extension with others, though more remote. A meaningful example of such a way is Wilfred Lam's show at the Museum Art Centre Princesa Sofia, where one can follow, step by step, his relationship, the intellectual and artistic sensitivity of a certain periods and find out the slow process of integration, preference and appearance of a specific work.
Fascination for painting and the solutions she brought forward to the history of art, and the rupture point inside her own work that she keeps transgressing: such are the attributes of Francisca Mompó's work, which goes on fluently steadying.
This Valencian painter does not only know how to theorize through images, but she has assimilated them as well, drop by drop, almost physically just as her references to both, baroque and textual and matter procedures, let us see: two references which do not really correspond to a «style» set in a determined historical and finished period, but rather to constants which appear through the history of art. Therefore, while every set of protuberances visually refers us to the baro¬que, her pace lies on the characteristics of this movement, essentially in her contradictory impulses.
Thus do dense gravitations cohabitate around concretions, whether coagulated or crystallized, as well as subtle and fluid escapes; downwards rhythms due to strainings and to elements in their falling process opposed to inner rhythms through transparencies that balance our look and lead it to other diagonal or upper parts of the picture; at the same time, there is a downwards rythming withdrawal, as well as an approaching to a micro¬cosmos, sometimes fuzzy, other times precise though always frail and undamaged.
Such contradictory intentions might be multiplied, even outside the picture, in its relationship with another, in the swinging movement between the extremes of shades of white, with its precarious and transitory character, and of black which symbolizes emptiness and unconsciousness: the two most opposed countercolours posseding the same absolute value.
And that is where contemporaneous sensitivity becomes transparent, from the American abstract expressionism of the fifties to the European and most specifically Spanish informalism.
The fact of forcing matter obeys to the laws of simultaneous search and spontancity. Search by means of a thorough process of accumulating classic materials: a cloth support and/or wood, the use of watercolors, oil and graphite; more primary materials such as sack or sackcloth, rubber, plaster and some others, more demanding in action time, such as resins, asphalt or caustic emulsions which mean a shattering though ins¬tantaneous fight in the plastic resolution, and therefore a theoretical mastery and a foretaste of the potential effects.
Such a during and suitable capacity turns out to have surprising results: surfaces where there develop corporeous fights, riots, bruisings and convulsions, with mixed up and elusive exudations. In the middle of this apparent chaos, other ways are oponed, leading to an underground current which is rich in poetic emanations. Memory, as well as other bidden worlds built by ambiguous threads, either sown or virtual, refined vegetable prints alluding to the ephemerous is allowed to appear through opacity. Silences are broken by slight intonations, either on evoking tearing cries or on interfering in harmonies, without any periodicity being hinted.
Mompó's own space is not born from a work of appearance or surface, but that arises from inner and always contradictory connexions, bet¬ween the violence, the anguish and the poetics of mysterious microworlds; between the minutest elaboration and spontaneity; between shouts and harmonic silences; between the «mise à nu» of the innest depths and the fact of hiding; bet¬ween consistence and the outflow.
Time also lies in the duality of the duration attained through the accumulations, the overflowings, the colors explored and their further alterations and of the ephemerous provoked by prints, the instantaneous treatment and the precarious and frail inclusions.
It beseeches the authenticity of Francisca Mompó's work, which pours out in a coherence of concepts and acts and reaches a unity through apparently discontinuous schemes and a constant duality of intentions.