REVIEWS

José Luis Meza Inda

The Fantastic Collages of Madame Goodwin

         Seductive, explosive, provocative is without doubt the work of the master Erin Goodwin-Guerrero, whose artistic language has been able to mix, in a clever balance, the elements and techniques of the traditional figurative painting, with an imaginative source of expressive modern elements.

         With total freedom, opening the doors of a turbulent imagination and with a latent squander of expressive energy, the author displays her enormous qualities as a draftswoman and as a painter. She grasps the realities of the present and of a remote past, and at the same time displays her ability to manipulate a wide variety of pre-established graphic media. She adds and takes semantic advantage in every one of her compositions filled with images of di-symbolic origins and of “images trouvés”, which act as elements that both crash and relate her works to the classic movements of Dadá , surrealism and collage as well as the “combine paintings”, that evoke the brilliant stages of the North American master Robert Rauschenberg.

         With such ability, and leaning on her luxuriant fantasy, Erin Goodwin manages to recreate the surprising associations and absurd encounters between the objective and subjective, establish a dialogue between the general and the individual, between that which has been functionally recreated and that which has been prefabricated, and from this heterodox and unusual mix projected towards the astonished eyes of the viewer, where her turbulent icons with her dense, mysterious and sensationalist imagery, agitate the subconscious fibers of those who contemplate and encourage, with her arsenal of phantasmagoric  chimeras and prodigious visions, the outburst of a waterfall of subjective interpretations or the search and retrieval of unforeseen conceptual meanings.

         Under the appearance of an ironic and provocative game, that is displayed in every direction, marked with the local needle of its inventiveness, the painting, the drawing, the stencil and the different processes of transference of images, printing, re-printing, annexation of pre-existing imagery, decimoniac illustrations and other visual elements that have been layered, with seemingly carelessness or neglect, in an exact location, searching and arriving at a harmonious balance and exact structural composition, Doña Erin Goodwin goes into herself, and invites the viewer to do the same, to explore the diverse levels of reality and unreality, to braid, like her, with absolute freedom, themes and images, to find parabolic values and identities, and to project them symbolically towards the impossible  field of the future and towards evocative immersions into the past. To make subjective that which is objective, to achieve, in sum, a complementary task between author and viewer that not only establishes the necessary liaisons of communication and generate a tight web of intellectual and emotional complicities, but to struggle for that ideal eternally besieged by all of those who cultivate the arts: materialize that which is spiritual, and to spiritualize the material.

Guadalajara, Jalisco, México, summer of 2005.

Translated by Elizabeth Freer Gomez