Arte al día Magazine, Marcela Costa Peuser, 2011

Vegetation cord

To celebrate life, that is what this installation by Isabel de Laborde is about, currently exhibited at the Centro Cultural Recoleta. Because paradise exists, and it dwells in each of us. . .but we must know how to see it. Isabel encounters paradise at each step in her happy roamings through the Patagonian landscape: she gathers, carves, paints, and intervenes with ceramic enamels the pieces of wood long caressed by the rivers and lakes, and turns them into works of art. 

For this French-Mexican artist who lives and works in Buenos Aires and San Martin de los Andes since 1980, this Vegetation Cord represents those affectionate bonds each one of us keeps building around oneself.   

This current exhibition, in which she has been working since 2008, is a homage to her parents. She has included a series of older drawings which feel at home in the company of these carvings and which, thanks to the alchemy of creative art, change their veins, charred by a thunder bolt or sandpapered by the winds, into a reborn spirit of a new being.  

This artist, that studied drawing with Aurelio Macchi and Eduardo Stupìa, painting with Carlos Gorriarena and Yuyo Noé, engravings with Matilde Marín and Lucrecia Urbano, lithography with Lucrecia Orloff,and ceramics with Alejandra Jones, establishes a dialog with each of the pieces found, listens to them and gives them the possibility of a new life. Sometimes they turn into a shield inlaid with colorful enamels emerging as a living sap between their veins. Others turn into a warm shelter of wood, yet keeping the beauty of the outer surface of the trunk, becoming akin to the soft skin of a Patagonian animal. At the same time, the inner surface acquires the texture of an obsidian stone, thanks to an impeccable stucco work with much sandpapering and caustics with scarlet pigments, overlaid with grey and black.    

Isabel de Laborde tells us this exhibition has three branches: the Woods, the drawings, and two plantations of trees she carried out together with her husband; these are in the shape of two hexagons with 90 trees each, representing the two parental lines, one gilded, the other of blood. Each tree will be donated to each person holding a close affectionate bond with them, forming thus a strong network of personal links.  

Love is like the sun, it shines and fills us with happiness . And as luminous is Isabel de laborde’s art. Golden and sanguine, to celebrate life.

Marcela Costa Peuser