Approaches to Patricia Henríquez

Posted on 18 February, 2015

Alfredo Gurza
 
 
The incursion of Patricia Henríquez (Mexico City, 1967) in recent years in animation and video art is the logical consequence of her efforts to extend her semiotic domain. One is amazed by the terseness of her transit into this new medium, the naturalness with which she occupies it, as if these were her more propitious surroundings.
 
 
With a wave of her hand, she sets figurations in motion, fashioned as vines, foliage, wings, stones, meteors, cells. Here, alongside the vegetable, animal, and mineral orders, a visceral order is effectively constituted. Her murals, large scale canvases, and extremely refined drawings, give rise to concentrated video creations, without losing any of the powerful expressivity which has been a trademark of her work ever since she attended “La Esmeralda”, the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving. The trace of her hands on the images, created mostly with her fingers, without the mediation of any brushes, gains new life on her animations, which thus become digital in a twofold sense.
 
 
From among the varied critical responses to her animations –which have been exhibited in galleries, museums, universities and art spaces around the world- we can single out those made by Cristiane Grando and Guo Jin, of whom we reproduce here a couple of fragments. These are testimonials to the expressive richness of Patricia Henríquez’s poetics, engaging in conversations with interlocutors from very different cultural horizons, as nodes of a discourse which signifies an affectivity opposed to any mawkish sentimentality; immersed in the maelstrom, deeply moved by it all, but ever lucid.
 
 
Cristiane Grando (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1974), poet, curator, cultural promoter of public art initiatives, and an outstanding promoter of the enigmatic work of the Brazilian narrator and poet Hilda Hilst, whose imagination weaves together magical and supernatural strands, which Hilst reveals in the skein of everyday life, through her sensibility, in constant tension between communion and awe. Hilst’s love of dogs –part of her personal motto: “Devoted to literature, dogs, and cheap whisky”- is echoed by Patricia Henríquez´s admirable and tireless voluntary work at a praiseworthy dog refuge in Mexico City. All of this configures a signically charged meeting point for the work of Grando and Henríquez, as can be gleaned from the text that the Brazilian critic prepared in 2010, for the collective exhibition at the Garden of the Arts Cultural Center in Cerquilho, Brazil, which she organized:
 
 

Birds and trees merge in the creative vision of Patricia Henríquez. Birds and leaves provide dynamics and movement to the rooted life of a tree emerging from the soil. Rapidly, trunk, branches and leaves turn into flying birds, which then become a tree again. This is the unity of the universe, suggested right away by a singular bird which occupies the whole frame in close-up. A city is assaulted by the wind storm we had been hearing and which now is represented by the image on the canvas. Leaves and birds merge into each other yet again. Next, the birds inhabit the city, on top of the power lines, because the trees –their habitat- leave Nature in their raw state in order to live in the urban world.

 
 
Guo Jin (Chengdu, China, 1964) is one of the most world-renowned Chinese painters working today. He is a tutor at the prestigious Fine Arts Academy in Sichuan, from which he graduated in 1990. His delicate sensibility, geared towards the timeless virtue of innocence, that suspension of time in the pure joy of life as potency, that “uchronic utopia” distilled in his exquisite series of drawings of children, has informed over the years his dialogue with the work of Patricia Henríquez, with whom he has shared teachings and experiences during the Mexican artist’s residency in Chongqing. In the catalog for the Found in China exhibition (Chongqing, 2005), Guo Jin wrote:
 
 

I met Patricia in the middle of autumn in Chongqing. It was the first time she travelled outside her native Mexico. She has the appearance of a spirit that has not yet experienced the world: shy, but happy and eager to spread her wings. According to her own words, coming to China is precisely what has given her wings.
Her works produced at the Tank Loft Arts Centre reflect the commiseration and veneration which Patricia feels towards life, as well as her sensitivity to everything that surrounds her. Her images may seem unrelated, but they say a lot about the artist’s tacit delicacy and concern for all living beings. Patricia says se only paints with her fingers and never uses brushes. This tactile method of painting contributes to the dialogue between the artist and the living beings that are her themes.