Ikus-esparru-zabalduak (Expanded Optical Spaces)

Individual exhibition at the Museum of Art and History of Durango, Basque Country.

May 5 to June 10, 2018

‘(…) On our own account, those like us who work on jobs that are left alone in closed rooms can very well tell how the space makes an influence on us: the softness or the claustro phobia that can be created by that space, the quiet inner peace or the anxiety, as well as the visual breath which can be offered by the cracks and fissures that break that isolation and the links to the outside. Just like endless roads, the acouplecentimeterdepth of the windows gives us the chance to escape. It al lows the interior to keep being protected by opening the option of changing.
Windows, besides filtering the borderline be tween the inner and the outer space, bring a change due to the effect of light. In fact, time does not go back or forward in closed rooms: the intensity of light, the moments of the day, the emotional state remain unchangeable. The light that invades us as it goes through the glass, however, imposes the passing of time. Its hues completely taint the result of our job. In the same way, the feeling of ten derness that the afternoon sunlight makes me feel when it enters through my window will soak this text. Virginia Woolf, in the writ ing room she had in Rodmell, her own room, placed the desk in the middle of that space. All around her, in front and behind, were the windows facing the garden. I imagine the light itself going through; the marks left by the traces of the winter coldness in the landscape would somehow influence To the Lighthouse, the buds of the spring flowers would soak Orlando.

Hence, it is sensible that an artist who has had as tools the impressions created by light and its beams especially feels the effect of such atmosphere, be it happiness, be it sad ness, be it monotony, or instability. And, as an answer to that influence, has Zaloa Ipiña built her Expanded Optical Spaces; she has made a subject out of space and light, hence, work on the visual representation of those areas. Ipiña introduces us into a double in timate space: what is now her home, and at the same time, what has been her studio for years. The space that combines the experi mental work of the artist and her private life must have, by force, affected her due to the long hours spent in it.
Zaloa wanted to establish from the beginning the link between the inner and the outer ar eas, since dividing them is unacceptable for her: Does my room not shrink or darken with the sunset lighting? Does the landscape out side not become the decorative background of my house? In order to achieve that gath ering, the structure –by enclosing the space– has made all the limits clear. Since she has created them out of Plexiglas, although we can see them, they do not hinder our way of looking. This way, by combining transparent architectures with opaque images, the artist suggests an attractive game. She inverts ele ments allowing you to look across the sup ports that would enclose you before; what is more, the outside landscape that was the al legory of escape before, now becomes a wall of two dimensions’.

Haizea Barcenilla

⇒ CATALOG