© Astrid. C. Hernández
BEATRIZ GRAU “ONE AND MULTIPLE”
Luis Angel Duque. June 7th 2012.
"With the shadow at her waist,
she dreams while on her railing....
"Things are looking at her and
she doesn't want to look at them ---- "
It was more than 20 years ago when I first saw Beatriz Grau, (Caracas, 1967), shy and attentive, guiding the Dalai Lama through the then new spaces of the Consolidated Cultural Center, (-now C.C.Corp Group), acting as manager, guide and interpreter, on her only visit to our country.
The occasion was a solo exhibition of photographs, (“vintage” all), that she had taken on a safari from Kenya, an African country, where she then resided. Through my mentor, the photographic teacher Ricardo Armas, I had learned about his student career; (first the " and then); and seeing her so serene and graceful, she was so oblivious to her interest that her tall figure woke up among the numerous attendees, to the event organized by Rita Salvestrini, I had the impression that perhaps, since I was little, accompanying her father, Maestro Alberto Grau, -who has conducted orchestras and choral groups in front of large audiences-, she could be accustomed to the crowds of the cultural world in Tibet, starting off School of Art, UCV “Photography” at New York University
Everyone wanted to see her, and she didn't look at anyone, in her role as "Virgilio"; guiding the paths of the new tower, the shepherd of souls, once the "golden child", on his enormous throne in Lhasa. And that is how she continues to be in her usual activities linked to being a qualified professional, combining the roles of mother, artist, promoter of emerging artists; and as a teacher of photography in the most important art departments in the capital of Colombia....
A few years later, I found it impossible to believe that from her residence in Nairobi, she was doing a PhD on the podium of the oldest art in the world, under the tutelage of Thomas Joshua-Cooper, one of my secret superheroes, almost a supernatural being. He gives his master classes in Scotland, and a little over 2 years ago, at a specialized congress in Japan, he was chosen as the most important performer in the history of photography; and he has long attached his name - thanks to his immeasurable talent and kindness - to him, as one of the UK's most respected artists; next to Ian Hamilton-Finley, Richard Long, or the architect Norman Foster, who are like gods in the polytheistic pantheon of art in Europe.
Already in 1992 when she was summoned by Caresse Lamberg, to collaborate with her photographs on Tibet, in a monographic number, "The planet as a body to explore"; and although we shared the same office, I did not know her; but her work multiplied in issue #14 of that magnificent magazine, which was “Estilo”. We finally met at the IIIer. Pirelli Salon, (an invention of Sofía Imber and Fausto Grissi), when she exhibited at the M.A.C. a series of translucent and multicolored palm trees at the same time... They were an open homage to the American artist Edward Ruscha; and since I had met him she wanted to know how one of my contemporary icons was: “simple, he scrutinizes you with his enormous blue eyes”, -I told him-, “and he wants to hear from you more than talk about himself, and he pays so much attention to you that when you walk away he doesn't. You can believe it”, because Ruscha is in the area of the west coast of the United States of North America, an artist of greater dimension than John Baldessari... Perhaps the most respected of all... As if he were F.F.Coppola .
To conclude this biographical introduction, I don't know if Beatriz Grau is like the immense Marisol Escobar, or like the aviator Jimmy Ángel, whom I biographed, who are not, or were, exactly aware of their dimension... Yes, he was. Though Alfredo Boulton P., when I published his biography in the catalogue-tribute dedicated to him by the M.A.C. in 1988.... The wise man, at 80 years old, who he was and how he invented art in Venezuela, so that Venezuelans would be proud of their painters such as Juan Pedro López, Manuel Cabré, Armando Reverón or the most modernist Jesús Soto and Alejandro Otero.
The years passed and in 1999 we had the opportunity to work together in the roles of artist and curator. The exhibition was called “Hypermedias” and it was the VII and last “Christian Dior Biennial”. The curatorship proposed to gather 24 nomads; and for that reason, there was the unforgettable Alexandra Meijer-Werner; Ricardo Alcaide, Edmundo de Marchena, Magdalena Fernández, among others. Of course, Beatriz Grau, she was always on all the lists of wandering Venezuelan artists around the planet: and thus she was able to exhibit two large formats of her beloved “Massai”, works made in Kenya.
By then she had settled in Colombia, where she still remains in her active roles -we repeat-, as promoter, teacher and artist, and now we are presenting her most recent gathering of works, "Here and There", where it is verified that she always has the curiosity to know which of the elements that make up the planet are still intact, as if she were an adolescent who wants to record all the emotions that surround her, because her works -and that is why I think she is an artist who takes photographs- are sensitized by the record: they are not houses, nor cars, nor mountains, nor opuntias, nor billboards, nor stairs, polar bears, nor diagrams, nor refrigerators, nor doors, nor landscapes, nor mountains.
In this perfect accumulation of visual ellipses Beatriz Grau teaches us to see what her mountains, her fences and sunsets are like; and how ports, cars and refrigerators should be; and why we need lamps, fish tanks, and many cacti and that pots can be combined with swimming pools and for a magical moment they become essential and very important objects for the world that Beatriz Grau is spinning... Because the world where we live, By fate or fate, she needs to be identified; and it is urgent to taxonomize and classify it, since visual laziness is taking over a large part of the human race (-we are already approaching 7 billion inhabitants-), and it is no longer about literacy or feeding those who have needs materials. We are approaching a strange and unknown threshold where human beings receive almost all images and visual stimuli, pre-chewed and intervened, leading to a banal and illusory subreality... The mass media, in all languages and countries, they have hypnotized almost the entire neural forest that makes up human beings, who are connected, whether we like it or not, with each other.
Beatriz Grau's work breaks that spell and for me it is exemplary and courageous; almost didactic, and I never feel satisfied with reviewing the hundreds of images of her authorship that I know of, and those that do not know the artist personally, and that is why they commissioned me to write this text-, so that it would be the guiding entity among her unpublished works and the public.
And to them I write: if it is important that Beatriz Grau is a polyglot and that she has studied at several universities, it is also relevant that she has spent more than half of her life in other countries and other continents. But it doesn't matter that she lives and works a bit far away, because her main interest is that her artwork be seen in her hometown.... That's the most emotional part of “here and there”. And that it must have been wonderful to be a disciple of de Armas, and Joshua-Cooper and admire the Dalai Lama and Beatriz González.
The guru of geophysiology James Love Locke in his latest work "The Earth is exhausted", signed in 2009, explains that in deep time, the planet earth is already 3,500 million years old; Therefore, the British wise man assured that, in terms of human chronology, he is like an old woman, since 88% of the time of his existence has elapsed. So, this beautiful and blessed stony planet, a green, white and blue sphere is perishable; and although photography and video are at the head of the artistic media bicycle race, for me, the meta message of the countless photographs of the visual nomad that is Beatriz Grau, is that all details and panoramas, objects and landscapes, highlighting the almost total absence of human beings "here and there", is that if she were to expand the sample to the hundreds of photographs and videos that she has recorded, and add to the best ones, that her shifting brain is continually planning, that she will soon carry out, and that we will look at.... If we gather these pieces of her multiple gaze, which she gives us with innocence and mischief, we could begin to build, -by loose fragments, like a puzzle of a million pieces -, a portrait of an old lady, but very vital and multiform, like a Greek or Mesopotamian goddess, who is poured and covered with atmospheres, oceans, deserts, continents and mountain ranges, called Planet Earth. The details do matter and for Beatriz Grau nothing has happened: “here and there” is an account of her recent evolution, because in it is intact what makes me another spectator of her works, because I admire and still celebrate her curiosity. indelible, because if she were not a talented artist, she could be seen as possessed by an incurable disease.
