Amelia Toledo: I Remembered That I Forgot

This exhibition offers a significant view of her oeuvre which uses a wide range of materials such as stones, stainless steel, tubes with liquid, paper, and others to work with meanings to present perceptions about time, space, the future or memory.

In the contemporary world, velocity is the driver of life. We are obliged to race along the city streets without being aware that time should be elastic and that observation is the key that opens the doors to discovery and human transformation. It is necessary to give time to time, teaches Amelia Toledo; it is necessary to walk, it is necessary to move through, it is necessary to cross the paths that lead to enchantment. “Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.”

The world is a tangle of threads, of translucent, mirrored, blue communicating vessels. Amelia Toledo is engulfed before the drawing of the human form, and her body, our body, is invited to participate and move along the pathway of the surprise. Together, we walk on this road inhabited by shapes, colors, smells, touches, feelings, sensations. “The world is large, but within us it is deep like the sea,” teaches Rilke.

The artistic operation consists of a curious equation in which the memory of the material is the path to the origin of truths created by the objectivity of science and by the surprise of invention. The artist’s entire path in art is defined by her respect for and fascination with the material, for its potential, its challenges, its limits, its destiny. Remembering is forgetting, knowing is asking; looking is revealing. This is the aim of art nowadays, concepts generated and fed by a history told and retold by the life of Amelia Toledo.

Strings, threads, rags, fragments, scraps, rags. With surgical precision, the artist defibers the material and silently repeats the feminine gesture, the daily handicraft of washing, sewing, cutting and silencing. In liquid times, Amelia Toledo subverts the female’s subservient condition by understanding the phenomenon of artistic creation as an outcome and essence of the feminine. Life is a wind, and the shape is transfigured in the rhythm of the tides and the clouds.

The idea of art as a laboratory of aesthetic researches to be later appropriated by the productive instances gives way to a world ruled by the velocity of communication. Today, the materiality of art is transmuted, and can be high-tech, digital, or even virtual, performing new roles in the globalized world. The enormous challenges of a place dominated by the communication industry require the construction of a unique and transformative language. It is necessary to see and resee artworks and concepts from our recent past and to identify communication channels with which it is currently produced, creating strategies that provide the public with new perceptions of the world, acting in it, as citizens, in transformative ways. The regenerative action of art is essential in the process of humanizing the technological advances.

In cynical or apocalyptic times, the works by Amelia Toledo constitute a hopeful and optimistic art. But instead of affirming an unrestricted belief in the system of traditional art, her artworks seek to flow organically on the uneven and changing terrain of contemporary art in its multicultural and liberating essence, harvesting not only solid truths, but valuable uncertainties. And it is in the porous character of her pictorial skins, in the ambiguity and in the subtle liquefied movements of her objects that Amelia Toledo seeks to bend the exclusionist, rigid rationality in order to create an affectionate, transformative art, based on research, poetry, and the certainty that only through innovation and creativity can the human overcome the limits and miserableness of existence.