Introducction

ART, ART MANAGEMENT AND THE MOVING IMAGE

By CARLES HAC MOR

«Confronted with the flood of moving images (T.V., cinema, video) that assail us, painting, photography, sculpture and installations, pacify us inasmuch as they require some effort to be looked at, read, contemplated. They don't assault us to the same degree; it is we who must attentively approach them.

The moving image has an immediate effect that we might call para-hypnotic; it demands our attention and tends to retain it. Moreover, we should ask ourselves at what point in any given concatenation of images the narration becomes immanent (or anti-narration with narrativity as its counter-point).

The fact of putting one image after another, however different they are, be it only two or many, immediately creates links between them. A painting, on the other hand, is an image full stop, and is basically non-narrative. In principle, a painting, whether it is figurative or abstract, is like a frozen moment within a non-existent narration made of figurative or abstract images. And, of course, there is no intention in our thoughts of favouring the still versus the moving image, but merely to underline that they are two different things and produce very different effects.

All the Avant-garde and all those who drink from the source of the Avant-garde -that is, those who intend to destroy or deconstruct- have, in fact, always wanted and still strive to break away from narration, precisely because narration has never entirely disappeared.
Narration can be naturalistic or realistic or hyper realistic, abstract, incoherent or dream-like, etcetera; and each of these narrative forms can be transcended by one of the others. But to escape from narrativity altogether may prove difficult, I might even say impossible, except for one fact: if there is one thing that doesn't exist, at least in art, it is indeed impossibility.

Nora Ancarola -a definite presence in the artistic scene- paints and does a lot of other things, in art, that is, she uses a variety of media and supports. And although she uses the moving image, we feel that she always overcomes narrativity. She eludes narration although her images are not still: they move yet demand to be contemplated.

Her videos or video sculptures or video-installations contain what she carries over, translates, bases on and adapts from the field of painting -painting techniques, textures, thick or thin, nuance and hue, forcefulness, composition and decomposition, transparencies and evidences, said and hushed, shown or merely suggested.

As her show at M. X. Espai demonstrates, one of her paintings is perfectly able to cohabit with any of her other pieces worked in a different medium, without grating contrasts, in the same warm discourse, one thing enriching the other, with none of the, let us say, showy effects that such mixtures and juxtapositions, or nonesuch on this occasion, have led us to expect. In Nora Ancarola's shows, in fact in all of her work, there is a great inner unity in a diversity of registers.
And this is because -one perceives it straight away- she has manifestly accepted as good -though it might be bad- for an artist to understand that he can use -not that he must necessarily use, opportunistically- any medium or support to unfold a line of discourse. This discourse is none other than what she constructs through her work with language, with the languages of the different media.»