Mayte Vieta Vieta

This piece by Mayte Vieta is delicate, introverted and pastoral. It immerses us in a small and obtuse universe where timelessness is made real. A mirror in the base shows that we form part of the world and draws us into the artist’s reflections on beauty. We are ephemeral, we are temporal but for an instant we are trapped in a complex reflection, suspended in the thoughts of Vieta. Efímera takes these thoughts on beauty and what defines it as its starting point. Its title points to the concept of temporality which the artist has attempted to conserve in methacrylate.

Mayte Vieta presents her work by means of different languages. Although she frequently makes use of photography, she always provides it with a physical space, thus transforming it into a sculptural object. In some cases she also experiments directly with sculpture. Simple lines and profiles, limited use of colour and great symbolic content. Animals of Time showcases totem-like figures. Dream-state greyhounds bordering on the surrealistic, recalling Dalí’s elephants plucked from the subconscious.

Memories carefully stored and arranged, biding their time and surviving in cages, on the alert for the moment they can spread their wings and fly. Captives. Mayte Vieta’s figures, immobile and threatening waiting inside their black cages, ready and expectant. Allegories perhaps for those prized moments, all the more valuable for being so volatile and ephemeral. And the artist, as a metaphor of time passed in danger of fading into oblivion, has decided to keep her memories in birdcages. Despite knowing that this will only preserve a small part of them. Nostalgia, memory and the past are constants in the artist’s work.

The artist awaits us at the threshold, present in the delicacy of her work. Hundreds of wings show us the doorway to cross. It is the entrance from one world to another. For the artist it may be the pathway from life to death, from the present to the past or maybe the future. These are all recurring themes in her work. She also works with the exhibition space, creating a special atmosphere for inducing in the viewer an atemporal state in which only emotion and concept exist. Reality retreats to make way for the emotions the artists aims to transmit to the viewer. To this end she often establishes dialogues between her pieces and between them and the space. In this particular piece the artist offers us a choice; whether to cross the threshold or simply remain spectators.

She sees water both as a refuge and a wrecker of ships, as a union of opposites, as emptiness and plenitude. The Mediterranean, nostalgic, envelopes her and her models. Le bise noire pulls us down into the depths of an atemporal space. Absence is in turn totality. Mayte often swings between opposites; the natural and the human, darkness and light, the past and present, movement and immobility. These dualities culminate in a strange, bucolic, at times surreal, universe in which we are immersed.

Roots are often used by Mayte Vieta as a symbol of the passing of time. Root Woman is a translucent being nurtured by time. Roots, like arteries, feed this being, whose existence is made up of the minutes, hours and days that pass. It feeds, grows, twists upon its self and seeks sustenance with impossible movements, constituting this being’s structure which, although static, remains filled with experiences and as such life.

Bucolic images swinging between dreams and reality. Far horizons endowing the space with a sense of openness. Silent and imposing nature. Mayte Vieta often travels to the past in her photographs. She makes use of the Mediterranean Sea as a context. It is automatically transformed into her quintessential symbol of nostalgia. Her landscapes induce in us a bitter-sweet melancholy that defines passed time that will never return. It is perhaps an attempt to control time. The artist, who describes herself as a nostalgic person, travels as often as she can to those places that take her back in time. Encounter Afternoon is perhaps an encounter with an experience already lived.

The root waits, now dead and desiccated, to return to life. On pause and in repose, preserved under glass, displayed and theatrically lit. It is resigned to not growing, to waiting, to wintering. Time does not pass, time is detained inside its case and the root remains, waiting, wintering. For the artist roots are often a symbol of the passing of time. While we preserve this root we can metaphorically control the passing of time. Or perhaps not; perhaps Vieta wants to show us how time toughens, how hours and days create curves, convolutions and knots. How time defines us, forms us and twists us. How it allows us to grow. Perhaps Mayte is showing how we exist thanks to time, and that without it we would cease to exist and simply winter, waiting for time to pass once again.

Trail of Time is a work consisting of three paraffin wax sculptures placed in steel and glass display cabinets. Once again we can see the artist’s obsession for preservation and slowing down the passing of time. Delicate figures representing the female body appear translucent and understated. They show the delicacy and ephemerality of the body. Far from representing only the artist and being mere self-portraiture, they speak for the fragility of the human body, at times showing it as defenceless. Vieta does not focus simply on a self-portrait but a representation of all bodies of all people. She looks for a universal representation.