Pilar Soberon

by Emiliano D’Angelo

With her photographs and installations, all centred on her fascination with the natural sciences, the interaction between elements, vegetal and animal microbiology, Pilar Soberon explores the heart of a sensibility that is ancient yet once again topical, concerning the most authoritative of epistemological models: the age of Newtonian mechanics with its vision of nature as inert matter without any intelligence, purpose or volitional energy having come to an end, the essential nucleus of a vision which predated Socrates and the Renaissance seems to have come forcefully to the fore, even if dissimulated behind an aura of modern holistic and eco-syncretic concepts. It is a matter of an approach to science characterized by a sensual and Dionysian flavour, which is based on an inclusive and overwhelming use of analogies rather than on pigeonholing and distinctive antinomies. Also the Basque artist’s curiosity with homothetic structures, whose fractal geometries represents the most fascinating and recurrent archetype, testifies to this.
Analogously – and this represents a departure from the path chosen by photographers of the “post-human” generation as Paul McCarthy and Aziz + Cucher -, Soberon is not interested in the human element, not in order to herald a presumed psychic and biologic apocalypse by staring into a glum and ultimate future but to retrace her common ascendancy with flowers, insects, leaves and the very molecules of water, an element essential to life which always plays an important role in her images. This attraction for the liquid matrix of life and organic matter is an essential element in an aesthetic (assertive and certainly not negative) based on crossing borders and hybridizing of a clearly postmodern character.
In her “Aracno-worlds” and “Nocturnos” series we witness the metamorphic adventures of solids that turn into liquid or gaseous substances, plants that turn into spiders, simple water drops which emulate the geometric and precious shapes of amethysts or amber pearls, semi-transparent valves set on the epidermis of enigmatic and hybrid molluscs. In her “Cryopreserved forms” series the refined dialectic between opposites as hot/cold, liquid/solid, opaque/transparent seem to combine an exquisitely contemporary sensibility with echoes of noble and antique philosophic systems as those of Tales, Empedocles, and Bernardino Telesio.
Sidestepping the temptation to pursue results that become overly lyric, surreal or that smack of new age, the artist pursues a line of iconographic rigour that never loses sight of the purely scientific basis of her speculative interest.
This distinguishes her research, also in terms of quality, from the work of countless other photographers who have wrestled with the representation of natural micro-phenomena without a clear theoretic and cultural consciousness.
To cross the border between cognitive approach and expressive attitude, between science and emotion, between sensuality and avant-garde (that old 20th-century taboo): this is no longer the heretic ambition of a handful of “overly eclectic” artists, relegated to the margins of the great international movements; it has become one of the most prolific and interesting developments which seem to characterize the new millennium.
Turning to the science of the future, Pilar Soberon invites it to dialogue with art and with the psyche, to itself turn into a form of art and thus redeem itself from the mortifying, alienating awareness of having been degraded to the role of handmaiden of applied technologies.