"Inner and outer landscapes of Isabel de Laborde", 2005, Luis Felipe Noé

Inner and outer landscapes of Isabel de Laborde

Prologue to the exhibition “Landscapes of Silence” at the Museo del Chopo, Mexico DF, 1994, and at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 1995. 

In the language of painting, nothing is in itself. A thinner line is one because there is another thicker line qualifying it as such. Otherwise, it would only be a line. A certain shade of green, may become yellow in relation to a blue. Likewise, graphics (precise visual concepts) draw our attention over paintings (purposely imprecise in search of a global reaction of our senses). They strengthen each other dialectically. Thus, Isabel de Laborde, when playing with her materials, the contrast of white and black she produces, displays a landscape of purely subjective resonance, but originating in a Patagonian landscape she knows so well. Though she is Mexican, her contributions to the new trends in her host country-Argentina- are, to my knowledge, some of the most original works of art, due to her double combinations between drawing and painting, abstract and figurative landscapes, the inner and outer worlds. Such inter-acting categories bring about particular and intense lyric effects  in her unique works.

Perhaps because of her implicit romanticism, the definition of the phenomena called Art of Coleridge (which I have adopted) fits her works very well. According to that definition, this phenomenon consists in turning nature into thought, and thought into nature. The inner into the outer world, and vice-versa. Perhaps because of that, after seeing her latest works, I asked her: - have you seen the water colors and inks by Victor Hugo?  She said: - No, why?, and I answered: - Because upon starting with a line, Hugo comes across the paintings, the sketches, in a landscape of dreams. I love them, and in your paintings I find a sensibility akin to the objective data of the landscape, but carrying within them a profound plastic thought .  
 Sketches and lines go together defining along a sensibility with eyes wide open. And this is perceived throughout Isabel’s works. The Victor Hugo method.

Luis Felipe Noé

Artist

Translated by Eduard D. Adamson