Paula Anta's photographs: order within chaos

Absolute disorder does not and cannot exist. A mathematical impossibility alluded to by Ramsey's theory, whereby, beyond a certain size, patterns or an ordering will always appear in a set of elements within it. A secret order within a chaos, to which the camera of Paula Anta (Madrid, 1977) was intuitively directed, who obsessively photographed plant clusters for almost seven years. Bardales and tangles, the least aesthetic elements of the landscape, which under the photographer's gaze are transformed into evocative organic groupings. A tangle of lines of abstract nature that gave shape to the series Knots: memory topologies (2019), with which the photographer won the 11th Pilar Citoler International Biennial Prize for Contemporary Photography, and with which the journey of Series, the exhibition dedicated to him by the Sala Vimcorsa in Córdoba, curated by Giuseppe Pietroniro.

It is the luminous weeds on gold leaf that take the viewer on a journey through the silent and reflective universe of Anta, which makes the landscape its protagonist to allude to other realities that connect with our most primal side. “The series tells us about the search for the beauty of forms in what we do not consider beautiful in itself,” explains the author during a telephone conversation. A search that extended to various places on the map: Italy, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, India, Sri Lanka and other locations on the African continent. However, it was not until the author, a graduate in Fine Arts, devoted herself to the completion of her doctoral thesis—focused on photographic framing—that she was able to establish a relationship between the images of neuronal forests and the vegetal clusters that so much They had attracted her. Cumulative processes that respond to a universal order such as that which could also be found in the movement of superclusters or groups of galaxies. “To talk about this universality, present in both the smallest and largest systems, I decided to use gold leaf,” warns the photographer. A material whose use dates back to the great cultures of the ancient world and that refers to the sacred, which the photographer will also make use of in one of the installations included in the exhibition, in which a tangle of thorns, discarded in a of a circle and placed on a black background, it alludes to geometric shapes that correspond to arrangements or systems generated by man.

Uproot (2023) is the latest series made by the photographer in Washington DC. It is made up of tree roots that, due to age or illness, have fallen, bringing to light what has remained hidden. Presented on a black background, like stars or meteorites, they refer to our origins as well as to primordial foods and establish a dialogue between the internal and external in contrast to the previous pieces.

From the first steps of her career, the photographer has demonstrated her interest in the relationship between the natural world and artificial structures created by humans. In parallel, the need to underline her link with the artistic experience itself has led the author to shape series and installations developed on site, expanding the limits of the photographic medium. Thus, in her work we can see an evolution from exhaustively planned approaches to improvisation, which, without leaving aside the research task that accompanies the work, allows the author to allow herself to be caught up in the energy of the environment. As in the case of black routes (2011), where he will mark with natural black pigment the vestiges of those commercial paths that linked the ancient metropolises, such as the Silk Road, the Spice Route or the Amber Route. Paths that today have been isolated or suspended, but intact and habitable in the face of today's hyperconnected society where everything is, in principle, traceable. In Edera (2012) and The architecture of the trees (2013) will again use black pigment. An inspiration that comes from the French artist Pierre Soulages, from the path towards the light – or towards our interior – through a shadowy material that absorbs but does not reflect. Interior landscapes, which are presented as concrete architectural spaces in which no one notices, as happens in Apr 01, where the highest part of a tree appears. “Another inaccessible place, which descends to us, volatile, subtle, delicate. It is not we who ascend to their cups. The rampant baron waits for the branches to descend towards him, perhaps to climb them again and see reality, this time, from below,” Anta writes in the presentation of the series.

He Khamekaye It is a landmark or signage used on the Senegalese coast, in the Grande Côte, to indicate to fishermen where the inland towns are located. Built with the trunks returned by the sea, as well as with tangles of nets, different objects, plastics and the garbage that floods the kilometers of beach, they stand as enigmatic sculptures or strange creatures in a sandy landscape. Chaotic shapes that acquire a more concrete meaning as one approaches them, while at the same time allowing one to let one's imagination fly. In order to shape a series, Khamekaye (2018), the photographer will document those milestones that she finds along her path, and she herself will create new ones. They are signs as beautiful as they are enigmatic and ephemeral, surrendered to the tide—like the garbage that composes them—where artifice and nature meet in a vicious circle. Although the author had been observing this division without criticism or apology, one cannot help but observe these constructions as a metaphor for the crossroads that human beings face.

In Anta's landscapes there are no distractions, they are linked to the imagination. “We inhabit the landscape through our gaze,” says Anta as she introduces the series. The the (2016), which means red in Hindi and where the photographer appeals to be seduced by color in a modified landscape through the application of an incarnate
pigment that, superimposed on the natural color, will bring with it new readings. In front, the series greenhouses palmhuset (2007-2010) tell us about the dualities that are established in these artificial spaces; between the warm and the icy, the wild and the structured, order and chaos.

The exhibition closes with Hoist (2023), which is presented as an act of “salvation”, through a series of images that represent the installations made by the photographer on the banks of the Potomac River, in Washington DC, where fallen trees rise covered in gold of a thermal blanket. The photographs capture the movement of the covers uncontrollably, at the mercy of the winds, while they sparkle in the sunlight. “We cannot control all our actions but we can take responsibility for them,” says Anta.

'Series'. Paula Anta. Vimcorsa Room. Cordova. Until March 24.

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