Only true painting captures the invisible. Before eyes existed, we used the eye for not seeing, a time-eye, an eye to caress the darkness of rhythm and now I know the secret of the eye: the skin was already watching.
Peregrino transparente, Juan Cárdenas
Entering Natalia Castañeda’s studio is to become part of an obstinate collection of persistencies, is to have access to a record of something alive, is to be transported to an imaginary meseta surrounded by enigmatic and baffling summits. This exhibition aims to share some of the tactile, emotional and collector’s experiencesf elt on crossing the threshold of her studio.
For a decade now Natalia Castañeda has been working unremittingly on her encounter with the mountain, and especially with glaciers, those huge masses of water in movement and now in retreat. The rapid loss of the cryosphere is drastically reducing water resources while at the same time the paleo-environmental information stored in the ice is disappearing. Glaciers are like time-capsules that hold climate history and as a result, they hold the history of the world.
Against this setting it is difficult to put a label on Natalia’s work: Is it field work, personal memories, scientific research, philosophical reflections, political stance, a mapping exercise or a geopoetical search? Undoubtedly her work flows and converges among all these dimensions. Her work is endorsed by the elements of her sensitive and intelligent relationship with the mountain, the environment and the earth. The search for a lyricism that defines the living rather than the abstract and a radical and critical rethinking of human beings’ relationship with the world is also part of her praxis that opens towards a potential realm which falls somewhere between art, science and environmental activism.
To illustrate all this the exhibition is structured as an amalgam of works combining videos, notebooks, sketches, drawings, maps and paintings of various glaciers: the Dulima, Poleka-Sasue and Kumanday all ancestral names in her native Colombia and the Aneto and Cadí-Moixeró in Huesca and Catalonia respectively. There are also pieces of Mont Blanc and her recent visit to Antarctica. All the materials on show receive the same unranked treatment of visibility or interpretation. This deliberate gesture underlines the different ways of representation and richness of Cardenas’ work, the myriad approximations, the impossiblity of understanding, fixing or capturing the enormity, depth and quiesence of her subject.
The videos use photogrammetry: images of the mountains taken by drones at different times are modeled in 3D. Natalia then films the resulting model giving it the movement and character of a map. The result is both hypnotic and pliant that also incorporates the voids and visual errors in the images. The little loops of the Aneto, the Dulima and the Antarctic provide a tactile, almost corporeal image that appeals to the senses and goes beyond the remoteness of the satelite mapping. However in some of the videos the spaces resulting from the technical faults overlap with another kind of void that is more real and more dramatic. As we contemplate the images taken in different lapses over the years we can clearly see how the glacier mass is rapidly disappearing. The accidental magic created by the mixture of visual errors presents an unwelcome revelation by showing us the true topography of the territory.
On the other hand her paintings are a visual perception of the mountain unlike the spectacular drone images. They are a subjective interpretation that forge a close physical relationship with the object, a tactile register of the dynamics of mountain that tell us of her own experiences. This throbbing, luminous technique reveals a story-teller, an affectionate mountain, conscious of the links between the material and the metaphoric self.
From her drawings and notes we can see pieces at various levels of execution from the more finished to the sketched, depending on the stage of the work. The field note books written up in situ are filled energetic, vibrant strokes. There is body, life and feeling in the rough drawings made in the adverse weather on a glacier. There are larger drawings that delicately insinuate the outlines of the peaks, the crags and ridges as if the artist wishes to emphasise the interiors of these elements rather than their iconic exterior. And there are elaborate maps that diligently show the glacier’s sheath. Together all these pieces share a common element. By eliminating a horizon their substance is enhanced. The substance once again takes centre stage in this work that skillfully moves from landscape to geological subject.
Natalia Castañeda’s work moves between a rationalist and scientific approach to the mountain that is topographic and documentary and a mythical and poetical, loving and sensitive attitude. In order to exhibit this methodological heterodoxy the pieces selected show its comprehensiveness as well as its fragmented incompleteness. It is an exploration of the limits of rational knowledge through the amalgam of evasion and chaos.
The mountain peaks and their climbing is often associated with the idea of the observer who sees and controls all from the summit. Natalia on the other hand does not look downwards or outwards as if searching for absolute knowledge. She looks along and inside the mountains and glaciers searching for their corporeality and mystery. This is suggestive of the philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s idea when he affirmed that we are encrusted in the flesh of the world. The world is not that immutable object presented in social or natural sciences. Rather, it is unceasingly connected. Our perception of it is possible thanks to our bodies and our sensorial functions. Humans add up data patiently but this is not enough. Knowledge is an accomplice in the mystery, not its antagonist. Being content with the knowledge means not to search for complete knowledge. As Nan Shepherd wrote in her book The Living Mountain, “one can never achieve knowledge of the whole mountain, nor of oneself in relation to it”.
For this reason the exhibition has been conceived as a sensorial place that celebrates the emotion and the mystery of the glacier while warning us of its fatal disappearance. For this reason also the exhibition is an adamant collection of persistencies, the chronicle of something alive, an imaginary meseta surrounded by enigmatic and baffling summits.
—Patricia Marqués, May 2025, Translated by Diana Mathieson
