The connection of Anna Ballester Eixarch with her land is deep and strong. The natural environment, as she says very well, is the paradigm, the permanent model of my work, be it the large and open spaces of the sea, with its varied personalities of blue, or the mountain with its polychrome fields.
It should not surprise us, then, that at the origin of her creative activity we find the need to reflect and transmit this immediate and vital reality that is nature. And, from this point of view, we could say that her work is sincerely and expressly realistic.
Yes, a realistic work, but in its broadest sense. A realism that we could describe as experiential realism, to the extent that it does not fractionate reality. A realism that goes beyond the existing things that the geographical environment offers us. A realism that prioritizes and seeks the invisible elements that nature presents in the eyes of those who know how to live and love it.
This is the novel and subjective reality that she presents us with her painting. A reality that has the property of existing precisely because it is perceived by the senses and interpreted by memory, that is, the landscape of natural things, which only exist if they are seen, heard … touched … that is, lived.
The landscape of an experiential reality, where what prevails is not the chosen object or the exact truth of the physical reality, but the way in which it is perceived and felt, which privileges the exaltation of the feelings and the violence of human relationships. A landscape that arises from a creative process where, according to Anna Ballester Eixarch, it is not limited to specifying the environment, nor to understanding the environment only, but rather enters to analyse it and, through observation, drifts towards resonance and abstraction. It is not based on superficialities or anecdotes, but that it looks for the essence and transforms it.
It is the expression, then, of a nature that the artist transforms into a landscape because it is linked to her own gaze, to her sensibility and that she offers us to make us partakers of her feelings. A landscape of her own sensibility and to which she invites us to enjoy and participate until it becomes ours.
And that is why, in order to encourage the active participation of the spectator, the author, instead of describing us in detail and imposing the landscape on us, simply chooses to suggest it by using brush strokes, where the lines and colours gradually adhere to produce smoothed contours and indefinite shapes, that invite us to dialogue and to an unavoidable personal involvement with the work.
Undoubtedly, this option is right: better to suggest than to explain: to suggest is to create, is to invite us to go beyond reality, beyond the world that is perceptible by the senses. Explicit, detailed and wanting to reproduce reality is simply falsifying.
To suggest is to enhance the gloom, keep the mystery that stimulates the viewer’s eyes to discover the mystery that, no doubt, would not have been transmitted with the description. As she says herself, in the search for essence, colour is detached from reality and from the primal act that it presents and does not represent. It is the architecture of colour that leads us to circulate inside the painting, contemplation.
To suggest is to illuminate what we want to be seen, but also the darkness that keeps the mystery and awakens imagination. It is the good measure between what is shown and what is expected, depending on the demands and interests of each, it is the space we can invent the rest.
Anna Ballester Eixarch does not present the work, she suggests it to us, and in suggesting it she proposes a beginning and leaves us an end. An ending in which the viewer, with his imagination and the contribution of ideas, will complete until he becomes co-author of the work.
This is the experiential reality that tries to transmit us with her work.
A realistic painter insofar as she makes us partakers of a dynamic and emotional reality, arising from her own experiences and feelings.
February, 2020
