Veintitrés Magazine, Miles of Wisdom, Eugenio Palma Genovés, 2011

Miles of wisdom

 A deluge of rain is going on in Buenos Aires as I enter the Centro Cultural Recoleta to meet Isabel de Laborde. She, together with her team, are giving the finishing touches to her exhibition, opening the following evening, under the name of “Cordón Vegetal”. While different illumination options are tested, we move aside-Isabel and I- to talk about her French-Mexican heritage, and of how love lead her to find her place in the world.

 Her warm tone of voice transports me to more arid lands, to where her present work to be exhibited, is spawned. After spending her childhood in Mexico, and her schooling in Beaux Arts in France, Isabel moves to Patagonia, where her husband, grandson of pioneers, teaches her the love for this land by the Precordillera, austere and windy.  That scale of immensity is proportional to its potential of silence and void which she needs to create. “It is a great joy for me to feel I have found a landscape where I feel very much at home.” Isabel is talking about San Martín de los Andes.

 And in the midst of these horizons, she begins to collect different pieces of dead wood, some stricken and charred by lightning, which kindles in her the urge to intervene on them to restore some life back into these forsaken piedes of wood. She notices these pieces form an alphabet of shapes, as in a new language, thus concluding they conform a new family. A representation of the current world, as it were, made up of Japenese, Argentines, Mexicans, and French, forming a belt.   

At the same time, Isabel and her husband decided to plant two hexagons of 90 trees each, whith the intention of donating  them to people dear to them, thus forming an umbilical cord of affections with friends, as well as with mother earth. The Patagonian rithm no doubt influenced in the way Isabel presents her art. It is not immediate, for it requires contemplation, the feeling of the pieces to generate an understanding of them and their scales. “A planted tree needs about ten years to establish whether it will grow or not. If it survives the ice and the animals for that time, then we can say it will grow. And ten years is a small part of our lives. With good health, we can keep working until we reach 90, as Louise Bourgeois”  

In this manner Isabel builds an imaginery landscape with textures of nature, upon generating a dialog between her pieces with volume, and her series of inks on paper, where her abstract drawings stand alongside geometric concepts, stencils and frottages á la Max Ernst. She takes Japanese papers and rubs them on parts of trees. Upon these she creates a serigraphy, addressed from the vegetation aspect found in the human body: the blood arteries as tree tops.

This Project represents how she likes to afford life, intervening different supports. She does not see herself as a sculptor,engraiver or illustraitor, but all three of them together. Including in the human shape. Upon putting to work including the subconscious, she does not, initially, fully understand what she is doing as from the stains and abstractions. And those miles of immensity and freedom to work are what restructures the final sense of her work.

 Isabel’s life is aimed at the consciousness of being; not only being able to know reality and help others.  Also to understand  that, though she has chosen the path of art, her real vocation is towards others.  

She feels realized and keeps fit through her work. But her great vocation is to reach the people, healing through her creative work.  

Art unites all people, all religions, all languages, it enables the closeness of us all. 

Eugenio Palma Genovés