NOCTURNAL FLUORESCENCE

STATIC EXPRESSION OF ERCILIA CEPEDA

Ochres and blacks converge to form a playful memorial where anguish and pain find their place, but also beatific, angelic presences, as unprecedented expressions of a dynamic universe. Thus, the artistic proposal of Ercilia Cepeda reaches an aesthetic dimension of the highest order. Introspection, yes, but also an intense gaze that encompasses other planes where soft nuances combine with the warmth of green and the explosive intensity of yellow. The perception of the world is inexhaustible as it is singular. Her ductile energy is also evident in the composition, in the sobriety of the texture, in planes that reveal both an unusual religiosity and an inner conviction full of vehemence.

The dark layers, the evanescent quality of the brushstroke, reconcentrate stories, ideas, anguish, intimacy. The tactile combined with the rough and the painful. Beyond its expression, beyond any label that might be added to her work, I believe there are multiple currents within her plastic universe. Abstractions, yes, because her plastic poetics uncover other vertiginous, profound, soberly taciturn spaces. The emotive dynamic overwhelms us. From the somber to the luminous and scintillating. She also alternates white with oranges and yellows: dimensions of color and suggestive composition that intensify this recurring dynamic.

Lyrical expression seeks the oxymoron as a communicative necessity; sharpened opposites determine that which cannot be categorized without limitations. The work of Ercilia Cepeda responds to this same literary figure. Taciturn luminosity? Matte colorfulness? Nostalgic gleams? The ungraspable acquires relief in its fullest creative sense. After all, naming fills empty spaces. Vacuity retreats before creative vigor and rigor. Ercilia Cepeda names those inner planes, those spaces that lie and underlie within the reach of her materials. The void withdraws before the precise, exact brushstroke. The plastic challenge is enriched and rises as a playful and unique ceremonial.

Needles piercing skulls, the anxiety that emerges in unfinished faces that bear witness to horror, perhaps primordial. The ebullition of memories, the inner river, are soundings into memory. For this very reason, turbulence persists and then recedes before religious planes that suddenly erupt. Themes that fill those dimensional voids. Thus, plastic creation, like poetic creation, unfolds between two majestic, sacred silences: that of the preceding passage, and that of the sonorous muteness following aesthetic realization. Abstractions, sensitivity: a complete proposition of craft. Communion and destiny oscillate from certain formations and textures to a primary figuration, within an accentuated sensory process.

Here, darkness is reconciled with strong modulations in an indeterminate spectrum of tonalities. Revelation and experience: Ercilia Cepeda seeks to conjure the heaviness, the somber introversion that at times grips her work as a perceptible dynamic. A sensitive universe beyond any manifest modality. The plastic dimension of the author, originally from Torreón, Coahuila, confronts the possibility of the static with a singular concern for agile, evanescent texture: dark backgrounds with yellow expressions as a creative search, masses of penumbra where light plunges into fleeting scintillations to form a sinuous geography. A metaphysics of penumbra, condition and conviction of color as brief, ductile accents, determine other significant facets.

The dynamic of impulse suspended within the interiority of nuances, sobriety resonating in pictorial rhythms, a warm resonance where color enriches aesthetic possibilities. Here, as in poetry, the image unveils the concept. Plastic wisdom, transfigured exercise: a poetics of sensations as a sensitive translation of the cosmos. If in lyrical expression we perceive rhythm, accentuation, the impact of silence, in the plastic work of Ercilia Cepeda we observe the muteness that reveals inwardness transmuted into forms and textures. If the image reveals the poet’s significant condition, for the visual artist it compresses and transfigures the dimension of the real, exerts its dominion to incorporate trembling. The image perpetuates the sensible.

Nevertheless, spaces and dimensions determine a unique presence, shadows and sober gleams that fade away. Vigor and sensitivity taking possession of the planes. Vital and visual perception of an inert, almost static space, with chromatic impulses. Quality and caliber of the plastic act, ritual of the immediate and the profound: a playful universe of pictorial matter—this is the aesthetic intentionality revealed by Ercilia Cepeda.

Óscar Wong

We often hear the worn phrase “the cathartic power of art.” In most cases, it is merely a rhetorical figure, convenient to embellish a discourse on the subject. In the case of Ercilia Cepeda’s work, we find, not without surprise, that we are facing a form of art that flows from the deepest layers of her psychological structure. Her works possess the virtue of concretizing her creative processes in the conceptualization and execution of her plastic perpetrations, using memory as a weapon. She takes advantage of her reckless appetite for investigating the so-called essential truths of the human being, inciting us toward the darkness of the horror vacui that we all carry within. These are themes we avoid because we need to ignore them in order to move calmly from one day to another, from one month to another. For the transgression of comfort and the courage to provoke inner demons, there are artists who, like this painter, delight in the tempests of the unconscious.

Emotional collapse, manic illness, pain as an aesthetic subject, compulsive obsession, recurrent depression, everyday incomprehension, death, guilt, death again, are themes she does not evade but rather explores deeply, with a sense in which art functions as a liberating element of the mental processes required for this type of creation.

The emotions she evokes and even summons are in most cases tempestuous. She grants not the slightest space to doubt or hesitation. The images produced by her visual conclusions and her inner struggle are relentless and recalcitrant, difficult and irrevocably unprecedented and unrepeatable. They externalize plastic scenarios that cannot be encompassed by conventional art history classes. Tools closer to neuroplasticity and neuroaesthetics are required.

Of autobiographical origin, these expressions evolve from the self toward universality, since they involve emotions common to all human beings. The themes this artist investigates are also universal themes.

The work of Ercilia Cepeda undoubtedly unsettles both curator and art dealer, as she is not an artist who can be placed within a defined movement or influence. She does not engage in a gracious dalliance with specialized criticism or the art market. Her plastic procedure leads her to assertive and intense results. It would not be appropriate here to speak of originality or authorship. Her value resides, without question, in authenticity in its deepest sense.

Cuauhtémoc Contreras