Mano de sospechas: Patricia Aguirre
Using a sophisticated humor, Patricia Aguirre detonates games in which domestic life, and especially the place that women traditionally occupy in it, is questioned as a space of comfort, peace and fulfillment.
Home as a concept finds its physical representation in the family house, the space where several generations live together, develop agreements and build a history. It is a temple and a shelter, a sacred place that protects what is most precious, a dream, a promise for the future, but it is also a battlefield where tedium, filth and discomfort are fought daily. It entails great sacrifices with hidden frailties and dangers, a reflection of the uncomfortable that goes on daily within its walls and that hopefully will not be known beyond the door.
In Patricia Aguirre's work, household utensils, necessary for its maintenance, become metaphors of such affective tensions. Using a sophisticated humor, she detonates games in which domestic life, and especially the place that women traditionally occupy in it, is questioned as a space of comfort, peace and fulfillment. For example, raised on broomsticks like waving flags, symbols of order and cleanliness contrast with stove burns and indelible coffee stains. This heraldry of daily life is not meant to represent triumph, but on the contrary signals a weary foot of struggle, an eternal amending action that aims to keep the volatility inherent in order at bay.
Like laundry drying in the sun, a variety of junk, drawings, photographs, texts and notes hang here on a string. They look like a timeline in which remnants of past, present and future projects converge, a sort of notebook patiently awaiting the moment to be useful, when they have had enough mental soaking and are ready to be used.
Also waiting for a good bite is a delicate dessert, a complex and arduous recipe of several hours of preparation that was inherited to the artist by her mother, and to her by her mother with complicity and affection. An inheritance that also represents an expectation of submission and care, in accordance with the feminine role of surrender embodied in a sumptuous dish that adorns social gatherings. However, one must resist the temptation to try a piece, because the one on display here is a sweet poisoned with lethal drops of hemlock, the plant that killed Socrates and many other illustrious rebels in ancient Greece. Aguirre rebelliously poisons her sacred heritage by illustrating that legacies and affections can be very sweet, and yet they deal closely with the inevitable fragility of life.
William Contreras
