Irene González. On the Desire to Return

“In the absence left by things, there is a kind of presence; in their void, their form still flutters. Melancholy is therefore a way of having; it is the way of having by not having...” [1]

I carefully observe the languid demeanor of the person entering the exhibition halls. Only seemingly fragile, hesitant, she seems cloaked in melancholy. This is one of the most magical moments for someone who has devoted their life to creating culture: the artist’s first visit to the space that will host her works becomes a moment in which everything else comes to a standstill and the only thing that matters is watching how she perceives the rooms, how she inhabits them, how everything comes alive.

If recollecting were forgetting—a title borrowed from a poem by Emily Dickinson [2], contains an eternal paradox: remembering not as persistence, but as dissolution; not as a stable archive, but as a vanishing threshold. In the work of Irene González (Málaga, 1988), this tension between memory and loss becomes a generative core. Drawing, executed with full attention and radical slowness, acts as a gesture of impossible recovery, an affective attempt to hold onto what has already faded away. As in Dickinson’s phrase, each of González’s images seems to remember in order to forget; or rather: to reveal that forgetting is itself another form of remembrance.

Pause characterizes Irene González’s artistic practice, her delicate line disregards urgency. Against the immediacy of our hyper-digitized present, her work is a quiet resistance, a form of rebellion. Against noise, the murmur. Against excess, the ellipsis. Against accumulation, the fragment. Against hyperconnectivity, the intimacy of a hand that draws.

In this sense, her work is constructed as an act of observation and waiting. What appears fragile—this world of subtle lines, of papers that veil and unveil—reveals itself as solid in its method, in its attention to the minimal, in the way time is embodied in every fold, in every visual silence.

Working with these themes as a starting point allows her to delve deeper into questions such as the narrative of images, their repetition, quotation, the fragment, the relationship between an image and the blank space of paper, the marvelous accidental encounters… Those encounters where sequence and suspended time connect her work to the language of cinema.

Inspired by The Pillow Book (Makura no Sōshi) by Sei Shōnagon [3] —a selection of daily observations, intimate thoughts, and poetic descriptions—Irene González’s piece gathers non-hierarchically arranged images, as in a kind of non-linear diary, leaving room for chance and desire. The full meaning of some of the fragments’ graininess and poor quality is to be found here, in an effort to gather together hazy scraps of memory, vague mental images created through layers echoing the gesture of covering and uncovering reality or its construct: superimposed papers, images that are hinted at but never completed.

Its logic is not narrative but lyrical, what Tarkovski would call the logic of poetry [4]. The piece installed on a balcony alludes to a kind of beauty that reveals itself only partially, like a whisper. Longing—that nostalgia for the unattainable—becomes a formal strategy: concealment as a way of intensifying desire.

Paper, always a protagonist, assumes a sculptural dimension in her work: folded, cut, superimposed, turned into a filter or membrane; yielded, entrusted to expert hands. As in the Japanese tradition that greatly inspires her, in Si recordar fuera olvidar (Origami series, I, II, III), paper is not just support, but a surface that veils, a device of concealment, an architecture of desire. Just as in Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, beauty is never revealed all at once, but hinted at, suggested, hidden. The visible is always straining against the invisible, and in that intermediate space dwells the poetic: “Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested” [5].

Irene González’s approach to the image bears a profound affinity with the language of cinema, not only through the sequential treatment of drawing or the way time manifests itself in each piece, but also through her sensitivity to that which escapes traditional narrative. Filmmakers such as Tarkovski and Ozu resonate in her work as silent presences, shaping an aesthetics of the fragmentary, the unfinished, of the image as trace or absence. In particular, Tarkovski’s thought—and his conception of cinema as an art capable of “sculpting in time”—offers a fundamental key: in Irene González’s drawings, as in the Russian director’s long takes, time is not merely a medium, but the true content. Pause, silence, shadow, the intangible: all these elements build a visual poetics where the image does not show, but suggests.

Thus, many of her images appear cut, interrupted, like pauses belonging to a longer temporality. They are frames of a story never fully told, intermediate moments leading toward disappearance. Cinema is a recognized influence: drawings such as 11:00 a. m. / 11:20 a. m. (diptych) operate as time-images, paused fragments that nevertheless pulse with an internal temporality.

In the series of drawings On handling paper, Irene González begins with the representation of hands handling books, papers and images that sets up a dialogue with art history but also with self-representation. “I assure you that, by reflecting and casting back upon yourself your own species, you will then be able to see and know yourself, though not by direct knowledge but by reflected knowledge; otherwise, I do not see how you could have any notion or idea of yourself” [6]. I borrow this reflection from Gassendi, included in Victor I. Stoichita’s The Invention of Painting, to explain that Irene González explores the ways in which the self is configured through the other, through what it reflects. “Quotations are for me that mirror of the other in which to search for and reveal my reflection,” she affirms. In this gesture, drawing becomes a form of specular thought, an inquiry into the gaze, authorship, and legacy.

Another core of this exhibition—perhaps the most silent one—is the evocation of home as a lost place. Irene projects door openings, emptied but not empty spaces, rooms remembered from a distance, hazy. Memory here is not clear: it is a melancholic reconstruction, an affective archaeology. It is childhood, but seen from afar, like in the recurring dreams of the protagonist of Tarkovski’s Mirror: “I always see the same dream... and when I see the log walls and the darkness of the entryway, already in the dream I know that I am only dreaming it...”.

Melancholy, in this case, is not mere sadness, but—as María Zambrano wrote in Claros del bosque—“a way of having by not having,” a form of possession in absence. As in the mural created specifically for the walls of MARCO in Vigo, the rooms no longer exist, yet their traces remain, like the black-and-white images from art books Irene leafed through as a child. Those pages displayed fragments of paintings, stripped of color and context, and yet that visual paucity was more powerful because it activated the imagination: the absent takes center stage.

In 2018, during a residency at La Térmica, Contemporary Culture Center of Málaga, Irene González began the project Toujours déjà, a visual exploration of eternal return. She rendered the same image sixteen times, with minimal variations, as if attempting to capture a suspended instant. Time here is cyclical and repetitive. A sequence activated by the viewer moving through the gallery. A tracking shot set in motion by beginning to walk. As in Ozu’s Late Spring, each drawing is a time-image: the vase that does not change, while bamboo branches sway gently behind the shōji screens. The motionless bicycle leaning against the wall. The immutable form of things that move. Drawing, then, becomes representation of time itself. Like Ozu’s vase shot, what endures is the duration of an image containing time without narrating it. Within that duration lies longing too, the echo of what is lost, and the possibility that memory is always a transformed—and sometimes unstable—form of truth.

After its presentation at MARCO in Vigo, a twist of fate has brought Irene González’s work to be exhibited in a space whose name recalls the birthplace of María Zambrano: the Vélez Room at La Térmica, Málaga. The video presented there is an attempt to fix time—not as an instant, but as expanded duration. In keeping with the tenets of the poetics of eternal return, it is a return home— or to another home—. As in eternal return, we come back to the origin, but something has changed. The place is no longer the same. Longing resides in the path, not in the return itself, but in the desire to return.

Patricia Verdial Garay

Notes

1. María Zambrano, Pensamiento y poesía en la vida española, Spanish version, La Casa de España, México, 1939, p. 151.
2. Emily Dickinson, Poems by Emily Dickinson, Third Series, Robert Brothers, 1896, p. 39.
3. Sei Shōnagon, El libro de la almohada, translated and edited by Ivan Morris, Alianza Editorial, 1990.
4. Andréi Tarkovski, Esculpir en el tiempo, trans. Enrique Banús Irusta, Rialp, 1991.
5. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, Leete’s Island Books Inc, 1977, p. 20.
6. Victor I. Stoichita, La invención del cuadro, trans. Ana Maria Coderch, Ed. Cátedra, 2011, p. 332.