Pilar López Báez: the games memory plays

A few children play, oblivious to the reality around them. No danger seems to be lying in wait for them, but there is something unsettling about the scenes painted by Madrid artist Pilar López Báez. The lower strip of the artwork, where the children's feet move, looks unfinished. You can make out the charcoal guiding the brush. The raw material of an artwork that speaks of the strangeness of one's own existence. Of that feeling of unreality that sometimes washes over us, a kind of déjà vu. I've lived this before, you tell yourself.

And you want to know what lies behind it, to understand the mechanisms of existence. But this doesn't happen to children, lost in their games. It happens to those who have lived long enough to have a memory. A memory shaped by their surroundings and by the historical past.

Identity and memory, life and death. Those are the parameters on which this Madrid artist, who is also an art historian, builds her discourse. She combines painting, illustration and collage in an artwork of great visual appeal that turns out to be strongly suggestive.

Portraits abound. Family scenes that are like those old childhood photographs we all have: first steps, summer holidays… and also the self-portrait, where the artist shows herself more reflective and self-aware, through the small everyday gestures that, all told, make up our lives.

This reflection takes shape in the formal aspects of the work, so that discourse and form make up a single body, full of meaning and eloquence. The collage technique lets the artist achieve this look of an old photograph, loaded with memories.

Her paintings are made up of several layers, alluding to the layers of recollections that make up memory. And as we experience when we remember, the vision that takes shape in our mind isn't uniform, but rather made of scraps. That's why the artist finishes some parts of the painting in a realist style, while leaving others unpainted, with only the drawing.

Like a memory, in that tense moment when it can either materialise or disappear forever.

Visit Pilar López Báez's artworks here