Aurora Cañero: Equilibrium

A concern for statuary and the desire to use it to represent mankind form the backbones running through the work of Aurora Cañero, who has been able to modulate her postulates without being absorbed by contextual tendencies that either fall into crude academicism or give themselves over thoughtlessly to experimentation in a quest that seems to find its sole justification in that it is a feature of dogmatic contemporary.  Javier Rubio Nomblot has pointed out that Aurora Cañero’s sculpture enfolds a tension “between what has just happened – a past barely hinted at – and what is going to happen next – discovery, movement, metamorphosis.  Each of her works relates a decisive event, that instant in which mankind, inhabiting the centre of the universe, comes up against its moment of truth.”  Through the especially subtle narrative tendency in her work, Aurora Cañero’s pieces define a small world in which things that are on the edge of the fantastic, or at least the unusual, happen. Dreaming and curiosity are subjective states that define position in Aurora Cañero’s sculptures. The use of pedestals as part of the rhetoric of her works is particularly significant in Aurora Cañero’s aesthetic system: ladder, hoops, diving boards, boats resting on their oars, rectangular shapes on which the figures stand. Aurora Cañero’s poetic practice endeavours to reclaim that monumental dimension, in the awareness that the collective narrative has been completely dismantled but even so without giving rise to an overwhelming scale.  What her work presents are not, of course, memories of historical events but bodily demeanours with a touch of fiction: monuments to imaginary forms of subjectivity. One of the issues addressed by her works is the question of nakedness. Another of her visual artistic concerns is the attempt to reveal the relationships of couples, standing naked on two hoops. The man and woman are next to each other, yet deep down, they are far apart, the tenderness that keeps them in touch is something precarious, and for the moment they dwell in silence, recognizing the state of exile of love. This sculptress’s task is to embody mystery and furnish an outlet for the expression of emotion in her works, by means of a blend of strangeness and a refined sense of humour.  Identity remains a puzzle, even when we have no other shield but our skin the subjective narrative continues to reveal its depth: the curious gaze discovers the abyss of passion and for that very reason needs to avert the fall, holding on to those ramifications we call tales, which are made up not only of words but of traces, objects, and fascinating figures.