Without any public responsibility | Carles Guerra

 

Marria Pratts repeats them like Cy Twombly repeated peonies. Again and again. This gives them a festive air. This occurs to such an extent that in the end you don’t know whether you’re looking at a painting or a film. The figures of ghosts move up and down, go from right to left and bend over as if a camera was trying to frame them. If they remain outside the frame, then we see chairs, clocks and dogs. It looks like behind each canvas there is a crowd of these beings that the camera catches, now and then, in a tracking shot. On occasions they are dark and on others diaphanous, whole and partially fragmented, as Robert Motherwell did with Elegies to the Spanish Republic. These paintings gave the impression of always showing the same painting. It was as if it was shown piece by piece. The black stains grew and grew until the shape was illegible.

 

In interviews, Marria Pratts always says that she is inspired by the walks near her studio. It’s in l’Hospitalet de LLobregat, one of the most densely populated urban areas of Europe. There are many premises on either side of her workshop. You can breathe the last-minute tension in the neighbourhood, that atmosphere characteristic of a property revaluation that appears to be imminent. Now you can just see businesses in which the operators wear blue overalls. In next to no time new blocks of flats will push them out. The last time I visited her, she was wearing overalls like those of mechanics. But hers were splattered with paint. The impression you have of her workshop is that everything is in transition: the artwork half completed and the neighbourhood about to change. It’s as if you can sense a turning point, which is when things can be understood the best.

 

I’ve been to the studio twice, and both times I came out convinced that Marria Pratts is the main character of what in the 19^th century was considered to be the artist’s novel. In a hundred years this genre has gone from Honoré Balzac to Jean Améry. In short, it is the story of the absorption of a being in which the others do not understand what it is doing. The everyday activity of Marria Pratts takes place in the studio. However, she does not aspire to the epic of a novel’s characters. Her entire existence revolves around those premises. She goes there every day. Inside, the works leaning against the wall appear to be the result of a disorder without which there would be no painting. They are part of a comprehensive ecology. In every corner we find traces and marks of the artist, gestures which in principle shouldn’t be part of the work. There are even things left over from her house, a cardboard construction with a bath in the middle. She doesn’t live there any more but the construction is still intact, like one of the most ambitious installations that she has completed to date. A Merzbau from the 21^st century right in the middle of l’Hospitalet.

 

The installation that she presented at the Fundació Joan Miró, 1 possessió Drift (1 Possession Drift) (2022) was an ad hoc construction for her paintings. The corridors and the chapels moulded with steel plates twisted and turned to open up holes, windows through which to look at the paintings. You could just as easily imagine yourself in Andy Warhol’s Factory as in the model for a future construction by Frank Gehry. As if Marria Pratts had built a Bilbao Guggenheim by herself. This kind of imperfect, mutilated and not very serious construction, which anything would cause to topple, causes mistrust among investors. It doesn’t seem very solid. But it ends up being the shape that catalyzes an economy in permanent crisis. It doesn’t need to be explained again. The relationship between capital and the ways of life characteristic of art –no matter how precarious they appear to be– was precisely a key topic of the artist’s novel. Therefore, you can’t mistrust this punk attitude because in the end it’s the prologue of a powerful innovation, of those which define an era.

 

The three sculptures that she has now produced to be positioned right in the middle of the Mirror Room look right at home. They are three figures of ghosts, old acquaintances. All three are painted pink and manufactured in steel by Gonzalo Guzmán and Diego González, sculptor, welder and hacker, respectively. When reflected in the mirrors they become a crowd mixed with the audience. It is as if the opera began its performance with the audience still standing. Having moulded them using the hydroforming technique, they have the same consistency as a balloon filled with helium. Like those used to decorate birthday parties. Who hasn’t noticed those which survive until the day after the party and lose their shape? Although Marria Pratts has provided the dimensions characteristic of modern sculpture to the three volumes in question –with the scale and size suitable to place them in a public park– they now look like soft, crushed shapes. Spongy and about to soar into the sky, like a balloon that escapes and flies away.

 

Joan Miró is often mentioned to situate Marria Pratts. The gestures, the circular scrawls and the fact of burning the fabric make it easy. The comparison is founded, even if it sounds like a marketing resource. She does this so successfully that, when she parches the painting, it appears that the ghost’s sheet bursts into flames, like a gas fire. The eyes of these three sculptures that she has titled 1 Sardana 3 Fantasmes (1 Sardana 3 Ghosts) (2023) also resemble the holes which, on passing next to the lake in Joan Miró Park –where previously there was the old municipal slaughterhouse– intrigue me like little else. There we find Dona i ocell (Woman and Bird), inaugurated in 1982, a sculpture by Miró which is 22 metres high. The black cavity in the middle of the vertical part is a formal and symbolic mystery. We can never be sure whether it is a hole or a protrusion. In the case of Marria Pratts there is no doubt. They are two openings through which the air escapes. They are empty beings.

 

When she talks about chairs, another recurrent form in her work, she says that they are “chairs without public responsibility”. Like someone giving a warning to make it clear that functionality is not the priority. They are not to sit on. It’s sufficient that they suggest a place to stop and contemplate the canvases and to pass the time without looking at a clock. That’s why the clocks that she paints seem to be melting, and we won’t mention Dalí now. All this is to say that these three ghosts accompanied by the notes of a sardana do not have any responsibility either. They are not guilty, or even detestable. Although they bear a resemblance to the characters of Mori el Merma (Death to the Bogeyman), the stage show with which Miró evoked Ubu Roi, for Marria Pratts they are figures whose origin is as mysterious as the quick brushstroke. As sculptures, they were produced welding the contours of two steel plates. Then pressurized water blows and gives volume. Lo and behold, the presence of a precarious boy, like a character from a tale.

 

However, these ghosts by Marria Pratts, despite their pathetic air, are one step from becoming monuments. If we think that the monument is not just somewhere to focus your gaze in the public space, but the place from which to look and situate yourself in this public space, ghosts are ideal figures. And we thus understand why she made them with such big eyes: because from inside they would be like big windows. We need to imagine them as sculptures to go inside, raise them up a little and take them for a walk as if they were giants. Now our bodily and phenomenological relationship with these painted figures is different. Before they were placed just in front of us and now, even if only virtually, we inhabit them. The emptiness of which they boast is not banal; it is the emptiness that has gradually conquered modern sculpture over the 20^th century. But now it has very little which is sublime. As we said at the beginning, Marria Pratts appears to revisit the star moments of modern art without giving in to the sentiment that these aesthetics demanded. This is a different era.