From the depths

Gaby Grobo conceives her work as an inner journey. In her paintings, feelings, stories, and memories converge through overlapping layers made with a thick material in which she condenses her life experiences. It is not about representation — although at times subtle trees or horizons may emerge — nor is it about highlighting symbolic matters, but about finding ways to speak of the most intimate things through art. It is the intersection between an expressionism that comes from the deepest part and the awareness of communicating it.

This search leads her to engage in alchemical processes, incorporating other elements into the pigments, such as earth, which becomes both substance and theme, accumulating and speaking of a place, of roots, and of origins. It is a constant dialogue that opens the possibility of understanding the present and imagining futures.

Restless and with the need to delve deeper into expression and share it, her exploration has led her to address space, incorporate meaningful objects into her paintings, and create immersive situations to participate in the sensations she has been cherishing for years and that she continues to nourish by returning to her land.

I say returning, and in fact, it’s not the right term, because just as it’s common to question where our place in the world is, without a doubt, she recognizes the field of Carlos Casares — where she was born and raised — as the most personal, a reference point where she spends much of her life.

It’s true that sometimes the places that marked us are recovered from a distance or after a long time in a nostalgic way, like when Lucio Fontana speaks of the Pampa horizon to make others understand how it influenced his thinking about space; or in a critical way, like when Anselm Kiefer revisits his childhood ignorance — due to a guilt-ridden society that chose to forget after the Holocaust — and seeks to show how history is inevitably present in geography.

But in Gaby Grobo’s case, it is not about nostalgia or redeeming guilt, but about feeling and recognizing, from someone who lives what they paint and doesn’t need to justify themselves with adherence to any artistic movement.

Her work also involves addressing a universe, that of the field, a concept that holds much more significance than the reductions to which it is often subjected. And by retracing the path of experiences through the painted layers, she renews the fascination of discovering something that may be buried, a mystery or denial. Things that perhaps have been left unnamed.

Those presences are there. And they are perceived more clearly when in her works she includes roots, because it is not simply about the fascination for twisted, intricate forms. There is an inquiry that is transcendental, and it is undoubtedly in these works where the synthesis of what she feels is more clearly apparent. Because the roots reveal themselves in front of the painting, resisting being mere paintings and becoming stories and questions.

Fernando Farina