english continuous-spatial-path.
continuous-spatial-cartographies.blogspot.com continuous-spatial-paths.
The sculpture "Sleeping Ariadne" (2nd century AD) is a classical Roman marble sculpture exhibited at the Prado Museum in Madrid.
iluminadagarciatorres.blogspot.com net-squares-lines.blogspot.com
THE ESSENCE OF ARIADNA "La esencia de Ariadna" by Vicente Verdú 7/04/2000 Exhibition Catalogue: Continuous Spatial Tracing- Ariadne's Thread "Trazado espacial continuo-Hilo de Ariadna" Geometry by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b.Elche 1949, Spain)
ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Elche 1949) repeatedly mentions, when referring to her current paintings, that the origin of her evolution rests upon the profound discovery (she painted two oil canvases 1986-87) of the sculpture "Sleeping Ariadne" in the Museo del Prado more than ten years ago. At first glance, anyone would be surprised by the radical evolution that unfolds from her first paintings—where rounded classical forms were recreated—to these current geometric and chromatic exercises detached from figuration. In appearance, the present could be interpreted as a break with the past, and the distinct current experience as a way of escaping the objective adventure of yesteryear.
The magic, however, of Iluminada García-Torres’s painting is that it constitutes, from beginning to end, a single task of inquiry, as rigorous and truthful as that which the painters most committed to the truth of their craft have undertaken throughout history. Art is a form of communication and a form of knowledge, and its history oscillates upon the different proportions of this double composition.
For many years [she has worked] almost in solitude, both inside and outside of Spain ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES (Elche 1949) has been advancing in a purification of her inquiries. From the contemplation of the classical marble sculpture, "Sleeping Ariadne", she did not obtain, as definitive, the visible booty of its ostentatious rotundity, but rather delved even beyond its marble effigy, into its structure, and beyond its structure, into the "drawing of its music." She called this exploration a path in pursuit of harmony, and with that obsessive tenacity, she has been obtaining the purest particles of the composition.
Now, in the paintings, geometric figures are perceived—expressions of a series of elementary motifs as if, in the research process, Iluminada García-Torres had managed to glimpse and isolate the genetic sequence of the original sculpture. Her fascination for that marble—which she painted from two perspectives, recreated in different landscapes, and dreamed of in endless versions—has been definitively revealed to her in the terms of its enigma.
What now appears projected on the squares is the linear architecture of that corporeality, because the time destined for the essentiality and abstraction of the object has reached this fundamental secret, its very primary DNA. Upon the canvas, the body of "Ariadne's Thread" does not appear, but rather its genome deconstructed into lines and color; its soul portrayed in the impalpable quality of the harmony that the canvas delivers as a synthesis of the primordial. Few painters are capable of having maintained such a severe and deep fidelity to the vocation of knowledge, and few have added to it an honesty so firmly established in principles. Thanks to a small group of artists like Iluminada García-Torres, art continues living and reclaiming its necessity, oblivious to utilitarian artifice. The painting fo ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES thus offers a fundamental challenge and the opportunity to enjoy the emotion of the essential. THE ESSENCE OF ARIADNA by Vicente Verdú (04/07/2000) https://geometria/trazado-espacial-continuo-Hilo-de-Ariadna-by-ILUMINADA-GARCIA-TORRES-centro-municipal-exposiciones-de-ELCHE-2000
net-squares-lines.blogspot.com spatial-layout.blogspot.com LONDON 1998-2000
"Geometric-digital art project by visual artist ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES (b. 1949, Elche, SPAIN): The lines traced within each 'mathematical unit-matrix square'—with sides consisting of "four communicating horizons expanded into cartographies of musicality—aligned with the sides of adjacent squares, deploy a 'continuum' of ethereal rhythms. These rhythms express a perception of various cities and countries through computer-generated variables of the mathematical concept (1991), maintaining geometric potential until achieving the harmony of the digital 'Musicality' diagrams: Sweden-Beijing-Africa-Madrid-Greece-New York-Brooklyn-Mumbai Bombay-Europe-Tokyo-Paris-Nepal-Berlin-Latin America-Universe." ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b.1949, Spain) is a visual artist who studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and the UCM (1965-1970) in Madrid, where she was a student of the geometric painter Eusebio Sempere.
geometria-color-musicality.
thethreadofariadne-musicality.blogspot.com 2014
music-numerical.blogspot.com Berlin 2015
musica-numerico.blogspot.com Madrid 2015
numerical-musicality.blogspot.com Europa
musicality-numerical.blogspot.com mumbai 2015
lines-numerical.blogspot.com Sweden 2015
music-numerical-drawings.blogspot.com AFRICA
cartography-musicality.blogspot.com NY
musicality-numerical-drawings.blogspot.com tokyo
continuous-spatial-design.blogspot.com PARIS
gravitationalwaves-music.blogspot.com1990
iluminadagarciatorres.
net-squares-lines.blogspot.com 2000 iluminadagarciatorres.blogspot.com
www.elhilodeariadna.net diagram-musicality.
Saturday, May 6, 2000 | LA VERDAD ALICANTE
text by SERGIO BALSEYRO • ARIADNE’S DNA
ILUMINADA GARCIA TORRES (Elche 1949) shows in Elche ten years of geometric search following realism.
The discovery of the sculpture "Sleeping Ariadne" in the Prado Museum more than ten years ago was the origin of the artistic evolution toward chromatism and geometry of the Elche native ILUMINADA GARCIA TORRES, an artist who has been exhibiting since yesterday at the Municipal Exhibition Center of Elche her 'CONTINUOUS SPATIAL TRACING-ARIADNE'S THREAD', a summary of her pictorial and also sculptural conception. "Each line drawn is a pictorial action," points out this creator who left for London two years ago until managing to realize her geometric work at Gasworks studios and exhibiting at the Kensington & Chelsea College of the English capital.
Ten years ago began the new geometric stage that she now shows in Elche after her last exhibition of realism. After studying Fine Arts at the San Fernando Academy in Madrid, she has been devoted to a path that the journalist Vicente Verdú describes as a subtle architecture of that original marble sculpture, "Sleeping Ariadne," and after its geometrization into lines in abstraction, reaching the fundamental secret, even the music of its very primary DNA.
ILUMINADA GARCIA TORRES defends the "theoretical and mathematical work" that exists behind her works, starting from her first painting, present in the Elche exhibition. In it was already that germ of the concept and reflections that rules her artistic path. She is already thinking about returning to London, a city she arrived in during the summer of 1997 and where she has been working hard until her work was selected by Gasworks studios in London, joining a program as a guest painter alongside a Swede and a Japanese person.
The artist recognizes that in other countries, such as England, "there is more movement" with this type of studios for visual artists that acquire vital importance and that allow various organizations to have painters working and supporting each other "with great strength."
Conceptual painting in Great Britain "goes further than what is done in Alicante, although in Madrid you can see something similar." In London, a lot of installation is done and, above all, "a lot of photography."
ILUMINADA GARCIA TORRES synthesizes in painting, "I lead to essentiality, to the most reduced expression," she argues. A decade is reflected in this exhibition which will remain in Elche until the next 31st of May and in which she has intentionally been joining her geometries and chromatisms 'forming diptychs.' Now her intention is to get to work with other materials, something that due to "lack of space" she has not yet done. Art is for her the essential and central sense of her existence and a constant search for herself through the myth and the labyrinth of her chromatic plots, as Isabel Chinchilla, Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Elche, points out.
Text by SERGIO BALSEYRO. Exhibition 'CONTINUOUS SPATIAL TRACING-ARIADNE'S THREAD' by ILUMINADA GARCIA TORRES (Elche 1949) at the Municipal Exhibition Center of Elche 2000. (photograph by PACO UCLES). Saturday, May 6, 2000 | LA VERDAD ALICANTE
combinable-numerical.blogspot.com 2001
Catalogue text by Isabel Tejeda May 2001 2001 Exhibition, "Continuous Spatial Tracing-Ariadne's Thread," painting 2001, "COMBINABLE Geometric Words," ceramics 2001 by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES. Catalogue and exhibition at the House of Culture in El CAMPELLO (Alicante), May 12–June 20, 2001.
Years ago, ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Elche 1949, Alicante) evolved from figurative painting to abstraction. Her earlier work drew inspiration from the silence of Morandi and the obsession with capturing essence characteristic of Antonio López. At just 16, she was López's student at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, and she would paint with him again twenty years later in a workshop he led at the Círculo de Bellas Artes.
Last year, at the Institut Municipal de Cultura in Elche, ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES presented a magnificent exhibition curated by Isabel Chinchilla, who perfectly understood the painter's evolutionary process. Under the title "La Esencia de Ariadna" (The Essence of Ariadne), Vicente Verdú highlighted in the exhibition catalogue the profound impact that encountering the sculpture of the mythological goddess (Sleeping Ariadne) from the Prado Museum had on Iluminada’s artistic trajectory. She painted that sculpture in the mid-80s alongside impressive still lifes of geometric objects. In his text, Verdú accurately reasoned the logic and evolutionary coherence of the Elche-born painter's transition from figuration to abstraction.
I completely agree with Verdú’s assessment. The pictorial analysis of Iluminada García-Torres is built upon the classic constant of representing essences and their paradoxical application to transitory concepts such as time and light.
Light. I remember the vibrant palette used in the works from last year’s exhibition. At its core, the minimalist aspect of her series "Continuous Spatial Tracing"—which reached its climax around 1993 with impeccable geometries close to the emotional purism of Mitsuo Miura—was still lingering in that work. Some of those paintings, which were truly excellent, hid something beyond words—something not as easily defined as the formal conventions and pacts we constantly make.
In ILUMINADA GARCÍA TORRES's current exhibition, these chromatic vibrations have been eliminated. In fact, she takes a risk by stripping away much of her color palette, sticking only to a few primaries she previously used during her time in London. Now, she incorporates black. The question of light is partially diluted to focus on composition and, fundamentally, the discourse of the line. She is gradually refining her work, removing everything she already knows—to avoid creative tics—or elements she considers anecdotal.
At first glance, this painting could be linked to Minimalism or even certain aspects of Eusebio Sempere's work; however, a more detailed reading points in a different direction. It establishes a subtle formal relationship between those 1960s and 70s trends and the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko.
They are lines drawn obsessively, analyzing the rhythms that emerge from the path of their trajectory within the proportional relationships established with the space contained in the modules. Modules which, according to ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES, hide the laws of harmony beneath their cloak. It could be a rational, meditated composition, and in principle, it is. However, a physical closeness to each stroke reveals that they do not follow a unifying model. On the contrary, they bring an impossibility to the fore: achieving the absolute difference of every single line from all others in the painting. From the totality of lines in the paintings that make up the series. From all the series of stripes begun in the early 90s. From all the painted lines in the world.
The hand and the moment of its production are evidenced, albeit quite subtly; a time of painting that intends to drag the time of perception along with it. At its core, it is a far from trivial matter: the transmission of emotions. And where is the emotion in Rothko? I find that, beyond the empathy the American painter creates from several meters away, it lies in what is hidden, in the vibration of the interstices, in a centimeter of cobalt blue beneath meters of oranges and yellows. In that tiny point. And everything else is placed at its service.
Within the neatly arranged modules of Iluminada García-Torres’s paintings, one glimpses varying degrees of emotion, tension, relaxation, restraint, passion, coldness, agitation, weakening, inhibition, shock, detachment, vibration, enthusiasm, tepidity, exhaustion... of the moment of painting itself. Lichtenstein already proposed this, albeit ironically, when he designed his large-format brushstroke with Ben-Day dots. And it is the praise of that brushstroke, though silent, upon which ILUMINADA GARCIA- TORRES disturbingly insists. At times grandiloquently, at others like a mantra. Timidly. With the rhetoric of repetition. Less spectacular, yet also more surprising.
In her latest work, begun less than a year ago in a ceramics workshop organized by the Fundación Capa, Iluminada García-Torres speaks in three dimensions. These are initial investigations into the experience of boundaries that she had already touched upon in sculpture. What happens at the boundaries? What happens in the shift from one form to another? From a wave to an angle, for example. These are never obvious questions; they contain the elemental, the fundamental aspects of geometric expression.
Numbers go on to infinity. However, if one wishes to glimpse anything at all, it is necessary to analyze to the point of exhaustion the infinite relationships between 1, 2, and 3.
Catalogue exhibition by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES Casa Cultura de El CAMPELLO (Alicante), May 12 – June 20, 2001
combinable-numerical.blogspot.com 2001
lines-among-musicality.blogspot.com
The Expansion of Painting in Cold Auras
Simón Marchán Fiz 2001
Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory U.N.E.D. Madrid
ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES unravels Ariadne's thread through an optical combinatorics permeated by the cybernetic randomness of genomes fragmented into lines that contrast with the immutable presence of squares as a degree zero and a reference to the essential. Synthesizing a great lyricism, mobile vibrations and the harmony of balance complement each other.
2001 catalogue text by SIMÓN MARCHÁN FIZ.
Exhibition XVII Edition L’Oréal Painting Prize. ARIADNE'S THREAD Continuous Spatial Tracing CXXXII 180x180cm oil on canvas by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Elche 1949). Exhibition at the CC CONDE DDUQUE MADRID 2001
https://ILUMINADA-GARCIA-TORRES-concursos-Premio-de-Pintura-L'OREAL-XVII-XVIII-centro-cultural-CONDE-DUQUE-MADRID-2001-2002
lines-among-musicality.blogspot.com
diagram-musicality.
text by José Luis Ferris 19 JUL 2001 - 00:00 CEST
Iluminada
Iluminada García-Torres is, I can say without hesitation, an essential painter; and, if pressed, I would even go so far as to call her a necessary artist. The recent discovery of her work has awakened in me a spirit of advocacy—even a sense of 'taking to the barricades'—to demand the place she deserves in contemporary visual arts. It is no risk (in fact, it is a duty) to state that the work of this Elche-born artist—committed to art like few others, at least in a way so steeped in talent and truth—has earned its rightful place in Spanish painting of the last quarter-century. I am aware that over twenty years in Madrid, a period in London, and her recent return to Alicante might not seem like much on their own, but let us take it step by step.
By both age and vision, Iluminada García-Torres belongs to the Novísimos generation—that of Félix de Azúa, Carnero, and Gimferrer. Although her discipline is not literary, she shares with them an admiration for the classical, a certain sobriety, and an aesthetic of similar craftsmanship. A distinguished disciple of Antonio López at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, she possesses an impeccable pictorial foundation that quickly translates into a figurative body of work marked by astonishing maturity, a personal light, and a precise brushstroke.
The fascination came later, after she discovered the marble sculpture of the Sleeping Ariadne at the Museo del Prado. This encounter led Iluminada to confront the mystery of the statue, finding within it—beyond the stone and its structure—its secret music. From that moment on, art became the very gateway to life: a threshold leading to a silent space, a territory of stillness, where inorganic objects sit amidst lights and shadows that vibrate and pulse with harmony.
For the past ten years, the thread of that same Ariadne has woven through the abstraction of her Combinables and that Continuous Spatial Tracing—a body of work that is at once geometric substance and mathematical order, yet also a human heartbeat, a singular stroke, and poetic reason. I must insist: discovering Iluminada García-Torres is as essential as reading Cavafy or Miró. Following in the footsteps of Eusebio Sempere and Juana Francés, Alicante should be grateful for a find such as this and respond to her work with the rightful consideration it deserves.
iluminadagarciatorres.blogspot.com www.elhilodeariadna.net
https://ILUMINADA-GARCÍA-TORRES/retrospectiva-1982-2009/expo-castillo-santa-barbara-Alicante-2009 among-lines.blogspot.com 2009
musicalidad-numerica.blogspot.com 2004Valencia
2004 "MUSIC and ART II 15 Valencian painters of the 21st century" curated by Manuel Muñoz and Pascual Patuel and of the text with Laura Sanz García in Catalogue no. 46 of the exhibition at PALAU MÚSICA de VALENCIA.
ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Elche, Alicante, 1949). She has made a decisive commitment to geometric abstraction, evolving from figurative painting from nature toward the development of linear forms and colors organized orthogonally in the space of the square. Her work moves beyond initial influences of the North American Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, to focus on a geometric work with metaphysical readings. Following paths already opened by the geometric Kandinsky of the German Bauhaus era, author of Point and Line to Plane, and Dutch Neoplasticism, she conceives her painting, sculpture, and digital geometry as a play of proportions and mathematical relationships.
Moved by these interests, Iluminada García-Torres came to formulate in 1991 a square base module that was subdivided into squares, where points and lines generate geometric forms. This mathematical system is to be the template for the beginning of her experimentations. Each "matrix square" acts as a mathematical and geometric universe; inside it nest the forms, points, and lines that Iluminada García-Torres considers independent worlds but participants of the totality, and an active dialogue is created between full and empty spaces because they generate multiple tensions, determined by form, color, number, direction, etc. We are, therefore, before an interactive space that generates an integrating harmony of all elements with effects close to Optical art, which she calls Continuous Spatial Tracing (Trazado Espacial Continuo).
"Ariadne's Thread" (El hilo de Ariadna) is the name she has adopted to denote her works inspired by the classical marble sculpture, "Sleeping Ariadne" from the Museo del Prado. ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES discovered in this work an internal harmony of geometric order that was to preside over her future work. In the research, she develops complex proposals with an ever-increasing proliferation of formal serializations in rhythmic sequences, parallel to minimalist music.
From these premises of her inquiry (1991), she has made the leap to the digital world; her work is completely incorporated into the new technologies applicable to geometric visual arts. Her latest works offer us geometries of infinite developments thanks to chromatic combinations and computer imaging procedures, where the brushstroke of yesteryear is now replaced by the pixel (picture element) and makes possible, by means of a plotter, the digital printing of large-format canvases.
With this digital procedure, ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES has created the geometric works related to the theme of this exhibition. They constitute the beginning of a new series whose starting point is musical language. This artist has known how to see and work with the aesthetic aspects offered by the graphics of musical notation. The staff (pentagram) or the tetragram is the linear framework where she deposits "musical" signs, as if trying to evoke the true script of this language. It is a recurring element that allows her to again develop formal investigations linked to Optical Art and suggest virtual movements.
2004 "MÚSICA y ARTE II 15 pintores valencianos del siglo XXI" curated by Manuel Muñoz and Pascual Patuel and of the text with Laura Sanz García in Catalogue no. 46 of the exhibition at PALAU MÚSICA de VALENCIA, December 1, 2004 - January 16, 2005, VALENCIA / ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES (1949 Elche-Elx Spain) participates with the Digital Triptych of STAFF (PENTAGRAM) geometries ""EL HILO de ARIADNA - UTOPIA: SYMPHONY, SONATA and PENTA" digital print/canvas 300 cm x 200 cm . musicalidad-numerica.blogspot.com 2004Valencia
combinable-numerical.blogspot.com 2001
Catalogue text by Isabel Tejeda May 2001 2001 Exhibition, "Continuous Spatial Tracing-Ariadne's Thread," painting 2001, "COMBINABLE Geometric Words," ceramics 2001 by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES. Catalogue and exhibition at the House of Culture in El CAMPELLO (Alicante), May 12–June 20, 2001.
Years ago, ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Elche 1949, Alicante) evolved from figurative painting to abstraction. Her earlier work drew inspiration from the silence of Morandi and the obsession with capturing essence characteristic of Antonio López. At just 16, she was López's student at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, and she would paint with him again twenty years later in a workshop he led at the Círculo de Bellas Artes.
Last year, at the Institut Municipal de Cultura in Elche, ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES presented a magnificent exhibition curated by Isabel Chinchilla, who perfectly understood the painter's evolutionary process. Under the title "La Esencia de Ariadna" (The Essence of Ariadne), Vicente Verdú highlighted in the exhibition catalogue the profound impact that encountering the sculpture of the mythological goddess (Sleeping Ariadne) from the Prado Museum had on Iluminada’s artistic trajectory. She painted that sculpture in the mid-80s alongside impressive still lifes of geometric objects. In his text, Verdú accurately reasoned the logic and evolutionary coherence of the Elche-born painter's transition from figuration to abstraction.
I completely agree with Verdú’s assessment. The pictorial analysis of Iluminada García-Torres is built upon the classic constant of representing essences and their paradoxical application to transitory concepts such as time and light.
Light. I remember the vibrant palette used in the works from last year’s exhibition. At its core, the minimalist aspect of her series "Continuous Spatial Tracing"—which reached its climax around 1993 with impeccable geometries close to the emotional purism of Mitsuo Miura—was still lingering in that work. Some of those paintings, which were truly excellent, hid something beyond words—something not as easily defined as the formal conventions and pacts we constantly make.
In ILUMINADA GARCÍA TORRES's current exhibition, these chromatic vibrations have been eliminated. In fact, she takes a risk by stripping away much of her color palette, sticking only to a few primaries she previously used during her time in London. Now, she incorporates black. The question of light is partially diluted to focus on composition and, fundamentally, the discourse of the line. She is gradually refining her work, removing everything she already knows—to avoid creative tics—or elements she considers anecdotal.
At first glance, this painting could be linked to Minimalism or even certain aspects of Eusebio Sempere's work; however, a more detailed reading points in a different direction. It establishes a subtle formal relationship between those 1960s and 70s trends and the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko.
They are lines drawn obsessively, analyzing the rhythms that emerge from the path of their trajectory within the proportional relationships established with the space contained in the modules. Modules which, according to ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES, hide the laws of harmony beneath their cloak. It could be a rational, meditated composition, and in principle, it is. However, a physical closeness to each stroke reveals that they do not follow a unifying model. On the contrary, they bring an impossibility to the fore: achieving the absolute difference of every single line from all others in the painting. From the totality of lines in the paintings that make up the series. From all the series of stripes begun in the early 90s. From all the painted lines in the world.
The hand and the moment of its production are evidenced, albeit quite subtly; a time of painting that intends to drag the time of perception along with it. At its core, it is a far from trivial matter: the transmission of emotions. And where is the emotion in Rothko? I find that, beyond the empathy the American painter creates from several meters away, it lies in what is hidden, in the vibration of the interstices, in a centimeter of cobalt blue beneath meters of oranges and yellows. In that tiny point. And everything else is placed at its service.
Within the neatly arranged modules of Iluminada García-Torres’s paintings, one glimpses varying degrees of emotion, tension, relaxation, restraint, passion, coldness, agitation, weakening, inhibition, shock, detachment, vibration, enthusiasm, tepidity, exhaustion... of the moment of painting itself. Lichtenstein already proposed this, albeit ironically, when he designed his large-format brushstroke with Ben-Day dots. And it is the praise of that brushstroke, though silent, upon which ILUMINADA GARCIA- TORRES disturbingly insists. At times grandiloquently, at others like a mantra. Timidly. With the rhetoric of repetition. Less spectacular, yet also more surprising.
In her latest work, begun less than a year ago in a ceramics workshop organized by the Fundación Capa, Iluminada García-Torres speaks in three dimensions. These are initial investigations into the experience of boundaries that she had already touched upon in sculpture. What happens at the boundaries? What happens in the shift from one form to another? From a wave to an angle, for example. These are never obvious questions; they contain the elemental, the fundamental aspects of geometric expression.
Numbers go on to infinity. However, if one wishes to glimpse anything at all, it is necessary to analyze to the point of exhaustion the infinite relationships between 1, 2, and 3.
exhibition by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES Casa Cultura de El CAMPELLO (Alicante), May12 – June20, 2001 combinable-numerical.blogspot.com 2001
https://casa-cultura-El Campello-Alicante/pintura-ceramica-geometric-art-by-ILUMINADA-GARCIA-TORRES-exposicion-2001 https://www.linkedin.com/
Diario INFORMACIÓN June 7, 2001
THE HIDDEN AND THE EVIDENT
Text by MARIO JIMÉNEZ MIGALLÓN 2001
The Elche native ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES (b. Elche 1949) personifies the true artist who, not satisfied with the achievements reached in one field of creation and when everything seems consolidated and clear, takes a turn and makes of her work something radically different from the original approaches. In this way, and following in the footsteps of the authentic builders of beauty, who dedicate their lives to research and experimentation, ILUMINADA passes from the figuration of her beginnings to a delicate and beautiful abstraction, although at no point does she renounce looking at herself in the classics. And thus she arrives at the Casa de la Cultura del Campello, intending to capture in the exhibited work the essence of mythology and, while she is at it, since these are nothing more than transfigurations of ourselves, to kidnap the form and the essence of the soul of everyone.
It will be the sculpture of Sleeping Ariadne that serves as the excuse to go further and interweave an enormous web of color and line of surprising and magnificent compositional complexity, which will make the spectator travel through the interior of strange, almost musical mechanisms. The essence of the artist's proposals creates restlessness in the visitor who, finding themselves stripped of the incidental, asks questions for which they will undoubtedly find an answer in the work of ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES. A work, therefore, that poses unknowns that she herself will take charge of answering in a generous act that plunges us into a field of simultaneous spaces of speed and deceleration. Ariadne becomes geometrized and the essence remains—the relentless truth of a mechanical interior, yet not for that reason lacking in spirituality in the surprising repetition of the stroke, always different, generating a scale that breaks the geometry through which her forms only apparently pass.
ILUMINADA demonstrates that she loves creation above the order that, in her work, will be—as already noted—only appearance. A feverish and passionate mathematics to achieve the transparent unity of space-time. A complex goal toward which ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES approaches until she manages, surely soon, to shed the last thorns that do not allow us to ascend the slope, always hard and difficult, that will lead us to the space of understanding. The cosmos folds and Ariadne welcomes it into her interior to expel it in the form of a beautiful mechanical artifact, which is nothing other than her true self, the true self of us all. ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES presents us with the most complex through a painting in which the hidden takes on more value than the evident, and everything remains in suspense until the energy deposited by the author reveals the truth that time is the residence of the spirit.
2001 Ceramic Sculpture and Painting by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES
Exhibition CASA de la CULTURA EL CAMPELLO, ALICANTE 2001
Diario INFORMACIÓN June 7, 2001
https://avam.es/artistas/
https://www.elche.me/
linkedin.com/in/iluminada-
https://www.instagram.com/iluminadagarciatorres/
https://www.avvac.net/
pixelbylight.blogspot.com mua2007
https://www.mua.ua.es/pagina.
numerical-design.blogspot.com 2002 https://catalogo/COMBINABLES-
"TWENTIETH-CENTURY VALENCIAN SCULPTURE" Author: Juan Ángel Blasco Carrascosa (2003) Professor of Art History, Polytechnic University of Valencia.
Sculpture COMBINABLES 1991, stainless steel and iron, 90x90x90 cm, by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (1949 Elx-Elche, Alicante). She studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Alicante and the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, where she was a student of Antonio López. During her early period focused on realist painting, she already relied on geometric elements for her visual compositions, as she was interested in representing objects through their most elementary forms. In 1991, ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES began her geometric abstraction phase: in painting and digital media with "Ariadne’s Thread" ("El Hilo de Ariadna"), a "continuous spatial tracing," and in sculpture with "COMBINABLES." The latter features a spatial articulation of flat and curved forms through the integration of the cube and the cylinder. The resulting shapes interact with the void—an active expression created by the total or partial absence of these elements within the sculpture's compositional structure—and the expressiveness of various materials.
"It is a modular sculptural system that connects with the poetics of geometric essentiality. The cylindrical and cubic forms—varying in size and number—and the drawing of the circumference and perimeters, depend on the vertical or horizontal primacy of their positioning. By breaking the static flatness of the cube (or wall of cubes) and the rigidity of the edges, in their conjunction, they trigger a dynamic deployment of visual rhythms and harmonious relationships between the geometric combinable forms, opening up the surrounding space."
ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES has exhibited part of her artistic production at the Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, Alicante (1993) and, in that same city, her exhibition Geometrías (1996), organized by the Juan Gil-Albert Cultural Institute of the Provincial Government of Alicante. Following her move to London in 1997, she was invited as a visual artist by Gasworks Studios and Gallery (1998–1999), and in 2000 she exhibited at the Hortensia Art Gallery of Kensington & Chelsea College. Subsequently—after her return to Spain—she exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Elche. In 2002, she installed her sculpture Combinables: Eje Energético (Energy Axis) in San Juan Square in Elche and displayed another piece in the Capa Foundation collection at the Santa Bárbara Castle in Alicante. She is the recipient of the 'Carles Haes' Painting Prize from the College of Civil Engineers, Madrid (1996).
TWENTIETH-CENTURY VALENCIAN SCULPTURE (2003) text by Juan Ángel Blasco Carrascosa,
Sculpture COMBINABLES 1991 by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES, (1949 Elx-Elche, Spain)
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INFORMACIÓN daily – Sunday, November 10, 2002 ALICANTE
TRIBUNE. Text by T. MARTÍNEZ BLASCO, Architect and Academic. 2002
The sculpture of the Plaza de San Juan, Elche
COMBINABLES geometric art, bronze-steel by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Spain)
For some time now, I have wished to comment on another sculpture that comes to bring us its artistic rhythm from the little square of the church of San Juan, there on the edges of the Arrabal district in the city of Elche. Its author ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (1949 Elche, Spain), an artist from Elche, spent her childhood among us and has had the luck of now installing her work in a quiet corner, where it pulses upright in vigilance. I remember that the children of my childhood used to understand by "replaseta" the place where we could play. Well then, in this quiet place rises, by the inspiration of the sculptor ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES, a bronze and stainless steel [work] that makes us play with its glints of optical art (op-art), highlighting its luminous impact as if it pulsed at every glance from the spectator.
And what has ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES proposed to offer us in this sculpture of hers? I must say that, since always, Mediterranean culture with its legends, roots, and mythological seeds, has marked the restlessness of our artist, leading her to create a very singular work. There was a time when, standing before the sculpture of "Sleeping Ariadne"—she of the thread that saved Theseus from getting lost in the Labyrinth—she went constantly searching for a path that would lead her to know how to compose creatively in that dark world of abstract art. And following such a Thread, she began in Painting, ordering "rhythms" until creating a language of her own. At its core, her compositional method can be related to the same one discovered by Mondrian. A system that allowed the Dutchman to balance rectangles of color according to orthogonal axes, such that the greater the intensity of the color, the smaller the rectangle had to be. This provided him with the resource that colors could be weighted according to stable balances in accordance with axes that were fixed in the painting or had to be suggested by making them disappear visually.
Thus, ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES treats her abstract painting starting from such a geometric system. She takes a cell—a large square that she subdivides into small squares—which she then attempts to balance by painting, with brush-applied lines, the multiple secondary patches that, depending on the firmness of the color of the lines, will achieve balance; that is, the harmonic stability of the whole. And she can multiply this compositional discovery into a thousand interesting versions (I tell this so it is known that we are before an author who opts for the mathematical decomposition of forms).
Believe me, her undertaking is exhausting, but it has the advantage that her geometric "patchwork" technique in metal can also be applied to the SCULPTURE of the CUBE, when one knows how to decompose it into elements, either in the form of CYLINDERS or as CUBIC DICE. And if, furthermore, such deconstructions are made of bronze and steel and shine, they will provide us with a balanced play of lights, which is exactly what the op-art movement—so widely spread among us by Eusebio Sempere—seeks.
And we have reached the point of analyzing the sculpture by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES, as I have said, within op-art. The artist has set out to bring to the square (where the Elche Municipal Exhibition Center building is located) a volume divided into small, shiny pieces that accompany the walk of the observer crossing through, offering them its geometric sculptural forms. There is more: for this rhythmic luminous harmony, she has used the shape of the cylinder and the firmness of the cube. And no other addition fits this patching, composed of fading light nuances; we are facing a beautiful frieze, well-studied sculpturally, which unfolds its lightning-like forms to dazzle us. ❏ Text by T. MARTÍNEZ BLASCO, Architect and Academic. 2002 COMBINABLES geometric art bronze-steel by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (1949 Elche, Spain) 2002 INFORMACIÓN November 10, 2002 ALICANTE
MUA, ALICANTE 24/01 - 28/02 2007 Museum University of Alicante MUA. exhibition Five Proposals for a Didactics of Abstraction. "cinco propuestas para una didáctica de la abstracción"/participates ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b.1949 Elche, Alicante) TEXT, DIGITAL geometric art, sculpture. For a proposal in abstraction: THE THREAD OF ARIADNE–CODE – IN PROGRESS UTOPIA. Construction of the poetic code : Reflections - free and poetic interpretation - Madrid January 1991, Alicante January 2006
As a result of my encounter with the sculpture of "Sleeping Ariadne" in the Prado Museum, I understood, through its contemplation via the oil paintings that I painted there, that the harmony of the sculpture "Sleeping Ariadne" encodes a semantic, geometric, and mathematical cosmos, which is the origin, the starting point of the path in the combinatorial poetics of "continuous spatial tracing," which since 1991 I have been developing with the same concept of an interactive system of spatial progression for the work, in three COMBINABLE dimensions, textual GEOMETRIC WORDS, pictorial and electronic art THE THREAD OF ARIADNE - CODE - IN PROGRESS UTOPIA, in plastic investigation and with new technologies applied to artistic expression.
From the first line and work of the series The Thread of Ariadne, its code is described, which I develop in the translation of harmony, capturing the energy of the tracing of the line in the space of the square in a single gesture, —emotion of each instant—, which materializes the combinatorial unit light-space-time-line (or crystallizes its trace in pixels), in relationships of proportionality with the variable dimensions of the geometric-mathematical structure—expressive idea of the "square-matrix-universe," the base in spatial modulation.
I interpret the free reading of my creative process as the construction of an idea in poetic progression, through the eurythmy of The Thread of Ariadne in connection with the spatial dynamic between the lines, the singularity of each line traced in space configuring a trajectory toward the light and the geometric flow in the breadth of horizons described by each sequence of images of the poetic code of —The Thread of Ariadne— is linked to the meditation of a utopia.
09-01-07 If the concept serves to define the artistic practice, the works are the necessary expression of the conceptual content of the artistic proposal of the series THE THREAD OF ARIADNE- CODE-INPROGRESS UTOPIA
. Understanding that the works, in their language system to be interpreted, generate a formulation when reflecting upon them, which establishes syntagmatic codes of relationship between the elements that configure them, as well as in the drift of their free and poetic reading.
Consequently, I think that the best artistic proposal would be the conceptual poetics that achieved the integration of the idea with the rhythm and growth of forms in the construction that configures the work, and [whose] poetics would connect with the essential activities of expression.
In art, there are no limits in relation to what aspect, perception, qualities, matter, support... the artistic object or expression could have. NET ART Internet...
The application of electronic technology in artistic practice is a necessary investigation for the evolution of my proposal initiated in 1991 in the field of geometric abstraction —based on relationships of mathematical proportionality between the line traced in the space of the square in the spatial modulation—, which induces me toward new approaches and alternative models of looking at them, incorporating the pixel as a pictorial element in the trace of the stroke.
In the artistic process, the disappearance of the traditional support as a tangible physical object and the transformation of the support into a structure of successive mathematical operations contained within the computer enhances, in my work, the combinatorial possibilities of creating images with geometric and chromatic configurations that I believe would not have been possible without these new media. With the images generated with computer applications, we can continue the expressive investigation of the work by integrating them during the artistic process once again into the traditional supports and expressions of the plastic arts such as painting, engraving, silkscreen, sculpture...
2007 Museum University of Alicante MUA. exhibition "Cinco Propuestas para una Didáctica de la Abstraccion" / participates ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b.1949 Elche, Alicante) TEXT, DIGITAL geometric art, sculpture. exhibition Alicante 24/01 - 28/02 2007 Museum University of Alicante MUA. pixelbylight.blogspot.com mua2007
https://www.mua.ua.es/pagina.
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Contemporary Art Collection of the Generalitat Valenciana IV 2021 ARIADNE'S THREAD: continuous spatial tracing 2002 painting by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES
GEOMETRIC PURITY– Text by María Marco. Velázquez’s fascination upon contemplating the "Sleeping Ariadne" sculpture in the Villa Medici gardens is likely the same feeling ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Elche, Spain, 1949) experienced when discovering this Roman copy at the Museo del Prado.
The "Sleeping Ariadne" on the beach, abandoned by Theseus, used the thread that helped the Athenian prince escape the labyrinth. The defeat of the Minotaur and Ariadne’s actions ended the terror of Minos, breaking with tradition and foreshadowing a new era. Similarly, the two canvas paintings of this sculpture, along with her analysis and study of it, triggered a shift in Iluminada García-Torres’s pictorial production.
The essence and history of the piece led her to a reflection on the labyrinth—specifically its layout. This marked the beginning of a path that continues today, rooted in mathematical relationships and space-line geometry within square modules: geometric abstraction.
After attending the Alicante School of Arts, ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES entered the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1965, where she studied under Antonio López during her first year. The influence of this realist painter is notable in her early works, such as "Paisaje urbano de Madrid" (1982). In this piece, a communication tower rises over a vast, solitary landscape, leaving the city in the background. A foreground bench creates a right angle with the tower, forming a composition that emphasizes two shapes: the lower rectangular zone and the cylinder of the tower.
Alongside the landscapes of this early stage, she created intimate still lifes where objects take on a metaphysical quality akin to Morandi’s aesthetic. Gradually, these objects shed their functionality, becoming reduced to their own geometric forms. This transition birthed her first labyrinths—landscapes where cylinders and rectangles collide, creating corridors amidst a stillness of space. These images evoke De Chirico’s empty plazas, with soft light filtering through objects and intensifying their mystery.
In 1993, ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES presented an exhibition titled "COMBINABLES" at the Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo (CAM) gallery. This marked the first public showing of the work she began in 1991, opening a new chapter in geometric abstraction. Here, references to reality vanish, leaving only the essence: harmony based on repetition, with the square as the fundamental element.
"The motivations behind the act and the reflection on the process of painting lead me to express that: The square is the container of space, and its development inherently carries time within it."
“I call the 'matrix square' (universe) the containing square, as well as the squares of equal or different dimensions within these structures, whether imaginarily traced or represented with points or lines in the composition.
The elements—the point, the line, and the figures they generate—can be interpreted as independent worlds that, in turn, share the same meaning we assign to the whole. Therefore, each element participates in the whole, and the whole is contained within the essence of a single element.”²
Since Iluminada García-Torres began her geometric inquiry in 1991, every geometry has been mathematically studied within the "matrix square," which acts as a module repeated throughout the pictorial space. This mathematical system establishes a continuous, infinite layout—an order governed by the principle of harmony. Thus, lines, shapes, and colors are established as a unified whole, while each individual part retains its own special character.
The painting “Ariadne’s Thread: Continuous Spatial Tracing” is a square canvas measuring 180 x 180 cm, which simultaneously contains multiple squares. Within various ranges of blue, vertical lines are intersected by three strips of horizontal lines. Inside this structure lies a subdivision of tiny, nearly imperceptible squares. The work possesses the spirituality of Neoplasticism and the repetition of Minimalism, creating an internal musicality—a rhythm of its own.
In 1969, at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid, she studied under Eusebio Sempere. Under his guidance, she completed several works and deepened her understanding of geometric abstraction. At that time, Sempere was attending the Automatic Generation Seminar at the Complutense’s Computing Center. ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES recalls the profound impression made by the use of a computer as an artistic tool. It represented a radically new art form based on mathematical and geometric principles.³ Although her interest at the time leaned toward figuration, she affirms that meeting Sempere and witnessing his enthusiasm for this new method of production influenced her later geometric research. She remembers how Eusebio took his class to visit the Museum of Outdoor Sculpture on La Castellana, with its magnificent abstract works and the bridge railing he designed himself.
These experiences, combined with her exhaustive study of geometric abstraction and mathematical developments (1991), would culminate in the digital art made possible by the plotter at the beginning of the new millennium. This tool offered the opportunity to execute larger pieces and achieve lines as fine as those drawn by Zóbel or Sempere.
In 2002, ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES opened the exhibition "Ariadne’s Thread 1991–2002" at the LONJA del Pescado in ALICANTE, featuring the work that is now part of the "Contemporary Art Collection of the Generalitat Valenciana " (2021). Once again, in the catalogue, she summarized the process of abstraction in her artistic production—from the "Sleeping Ariadne" sculpture to her latest works, where lines multiply and the process becomes more complex:
"Following my viewing of the Ariadne sculpture at the Museo del Prado, and through the two oil paintings I created there of said sculpture, I became aware that its harmony—that alchemy of power and subtlety that so impressed and fascinated me—was not accidental. I discovered that this harmony invokes a geometric and mathematical cosmos that now guides the poetics of my painting."⁴
As Vicente Verdú noted in the catalogue published by the Elche City Council in 2000, the harmony of lines combined with color synthesizes the "sculptural object" in such a way that it "delves into the drawing of its own music." Iluminada García uses a pattern similar to music, repeating notes to achieve harmony, much like Bach—arguably one of the musicians who best represents the relationship between music and mathematics. Many of the master's compositions possess a symmetrical property, a flow of geometric relationships, and a fractal system.
The work in this exhibition creates a matrix grid where a play of light and shadow is established over a single blue tone. Although the pattern is not exactly identical throughout this piece, the multiple repetitions are sufficient to create an internal harmony—an order found in each of her works. This entire layout leads us back to the myth of Ariadne, to the thread that helped Theseus escape the Labyrinth. The thread serves as the way out of the maze, understood here as a line that progressively configures geometric shapes, allowing one to escape any complex situation through its path.
Footnotes: ¹ Both the still lifes and the labyrinths exhibited in 1990 at the Albatros Gallery in Madrid serve as the preamble to her new stage based on geometric abstraction. Landscapes, portraits, and objects give way to orthogonal forms, thus beginning a research process centered on the mathematical relationships between lines inscribed within a square.
² Words of Iluminada García-Torres in: Combinables. [Exhibition catalogue]. Fundación Cultural CAM, 1993. Page 11.
³ In 1966, through an agreement between the University and IBM, the Computing Center of the Complutense University of Madrid was created. As a result of years of work, two exhibitions were held at the Center: the first in 1969 titled "Computable Forms" (Formas computables) and the second, "Automatic Generation of Plastic Forms" (Generación automática de formas plásticas), in 1970 to close the academic year. The collaboration between computer scientists and artists aimed to show that the machine could also assist in creative tasks. In 1971, two further shows were held: "Computer Assisted Art Exhibition" at the Palacio Nacional de Congresos in Madrid, coinciding with a European symposium on computer design, and "Computed Forms" (Formas computadas) featuring works from the seminar.
⁴ GARCÍA-TORRES, ILUMINADA, 2002: El hilo de Ariadna 1991-2002. [Exhibition catalogue]. Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Alicante. Patronato Municipal de Cultura. Page 14.
Bibliography & References:
—GARCÍA-TORRES, ILUMINADA, 2014: Ariadne's Thread-Music, digital music diagram 1991-2014. [Exhibition catalogue]. Diputación de Alicante. Área de Cultura.
—GARCÍA-TORRES, ILUMINADA, 2003: El fil d'Ariadna– Combinatòria (2003). Col·lecció Amérigo. [Exhibition catalogue]. Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Alicante.
—GARCÍA-TORRES, ILUMINADA, 2009: Retrospectiva 1982-2009. [Exhibition catalogue]. Ayuntamiento de Alicante. Alicante Cultura.
—HUERTA, RICARD (coord.) 2001: Eusebi Sempere. De l'art al microxip. Universitat de València.
Catalogue: Contemporary Art Collection of the Generalitat Valenciana IV 2021
EL HILO DE ARIADNA-Trazado Espacial Continuo 2002 by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES elhilodeariadna-combinatoria.blogspot.com 2021
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2007 Exhibition: VI Mostra of Electronic Art of Móstoles (MAEM 07) OSMOSIS, MADRID. Centro Cultural Villa de Móstoles (MADRID) (29/10 16/11 2007) Text by Juan Antonio Lleó. Participating visual Artist: ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b.Elche, 1949) with two works of digital Geometric Art. Catalogue Image: "Ariadne’s Thread – Music" (2007). Digital print on canvas. 200 x 100 cm.
"Through series of rhythmic sequences—paralleling the world of minimal music—her work incorporates new technologies applied to art. These offer us geometries of infinite development thanks to chromatic combinations where the brushstroke is now structured by the pixel (picture element).
Using digital media, Iluminada García-Torres has created the works Ariadne’s Thread – In Progress Utopia-Music, which mark the beginning of a new series based on musical language. This artist has successfully identified and manipulated the aesthetic aspects offered by musical notation graphics, allowing her to develop formal investigations and suggest all types of virtual movements." — Text by Pascual Patuel Chust, University of Valencia (Extracted from the catalogue "The Sounds of Valencian Painting," exhibition "Music and Art II," Palau de la Música de Valencia, 2004). el-hilo-digital.blogspot.com 2005-07 https://www.linkedin.com/posts
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Interview by Miguel Fernández-Cid. Diario 16, Dec 5 1990
To ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Elche 1949, Spain) "The Individual Exhibition Painting of Iluminada García" 1990
ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (1949 Elche, Alicante) is exhibiting at the Albatros Gallery until early January, marking her solo debut in Madrid. A self-portrait on a backdrop of silhouetted mountains introduces two easily distinguishable groups of work. On one side are the pieces inspired by her fascination with a Hellenistic sculpture of Ariadne. Her treatment of Ariadne in foreshortening ranges from Sorolla-esque hues to interpretations in darker tones, with the sea and a diluted landscape as a backdrop.
"I went to the Prado Museum looking for an image that would unsettle me, and I found this sculpture. I first painted her from the front, but she continued to seduce me; in another canvas, I painted her from behind, which was already an act of daring. I returned several times, imagined a landscape in the background—a landscape that grew and changed as I painted it... and I know I will return to this Ariadne again, because it is impossible for me to forget her perfection, her harmony, her mathematical control."
"I was born by the sea and, although I came to Madrid at sixteen to study Fine Arts, its presence is always close to me. I notice it in the need to include a horizon line—a reference to space—in every painting."
The intimate nature of her painting is most evident in the series where, starting from the idea and minimal elements of a still life, she derives architectural formulas. Morandi, the Metaphysical painters, and the Quattrocento masters are never far from a style that ultimately reveals itself as warm and personal: "For me, the essential thing is the relationship with objects—entering into a dialogue with them so that the painting responds to what they demand."
A few bars and a box on a table serve to construct a clean still life of "absences." Seen from another angle, these same elements are arranged like a labyrinth, carrying a sense of mystery that her painting constantly evokes. Iluminada García insists on following the rhythm dictated by her work. She feels detached from artistic groups and rejects easy classifications:
"An object is different depending on how we see it; the proximity of another object modifies the perception. How can one not understand that painting is an individual battle?" Interview by Miguel Fernández-Cid. Diario 16, Dec 5, 1990 To ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Elche 1949, Spain)
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ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Elche 1949, Spain) At the age of 16, she entered the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid; by 19, she was already acquainted with the Computing Center at the Complutense University. After a highly regarded realist period spanning 20 years, she made the leap in the early 90s to geometric abstraction in painting, sculpture, and digital imaging. Since 1994, 18 silkscreen prints by this artist from Elche have been part of the 20th Century Collection of the National Library. Immersed in "Ariadne's Thread," her research in the search for harmony is continuous.
Tell me about your childhood...
I knew I wanted to paint from a very young age when I lived in Elche. During the 1964-65 academic year, I studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Alicante, preparing to enter the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, which I did that same year.
One of your teachers was Antonio López.
I came to painting through him; he taught me during my first year in Coloring and Composition. Years later, in 1984, I became his student again at the Contemporary Art Workshop (Taller de Arte Actual) held at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. Although I had already held some exhibitions of realist painting, I found aspects of my technique that needed improvement and maturity, and I was better prepared to absorb his teachings. Antonio López taught me how to structure the direct brushstroke.
And Eusebio Sempere?
In 1969, and for a few months, he taught me at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He introduced me to the existence of the Computing Center, where IBM programmers and artists worked on new fields of artistic expression. His influence has been present throughout all my artistic stages.
For the readers of EL SALT, recall the names of some of your classmates at the School of Fine Arts...Pedro Cano, José M.ª Cuasante, Florencio Galindo, Cayetano Portellano, Alfonso Galván, Teresa Muñiz, Lino Cabezas, José M.ª Mezquita, M.ª Luisa Sanz... these and others whom I value greatly as colleagues and renowned artists.
What has the sculpture of Ariadne meant in your artistic evolution?
I discovered the marble sculpture of "Sleeping Ariadne" at the Prado Museum in 1984. I encountered her again in...the exhibition of the restoration of Las Meninas, which was presented the painting in the same Circular Room as the sculpture of Ariadne. I knew then that I had to paint her. First, I painted her from the front and then from behind, with her own horizon... with another dimension, "Ariadne's Thread" (El Hilo de Ariadna). I understood that her harmony codifies a semantic, geometric, and mathematical cosmos, which is the origin of the 1991 start of "Continuous Spatial Path" (Trazado Espacial Continuo) in geometric abstraction, and "Combinables" in sculpture, which I presented in Alicante (1993) with an exhibition at the CAM galleries and an elaborate catalog.
What is a brushstroke to you?
The brushstroke is the affirmation of energy captured in a single stroke. As the lines are expressed in single-gesture brushstrokes, each one is unique in its meditative trajectory of lived moments, translated into rhythms that breathe in tonal gradations in dialogue with the void. Sometimes they evoke color symphonies, and at other times they affirm the gestural nature of the stroke in black and white, within a structural system of interrelationships.
Among other exhibitions, you held one in 2000 at the Hortensia Gallery, Kensington & Chelsea College (London). In 2002, "Ariadne's Thread 1991-2002" (Lonja del Pescado, Alicante). In 2006, at the College of Architects of Alicante, and in 2007, at the Museum of the University of Alicante (MUA), with the variable dimensions of the squares containing them, which transport us to horizons expanding toward infinity.
Mathematics, Geometry, Point, Line, Space—how many research projects do you have on these subjects and the evolution of your art?
More than twenty, the first being Combinables-Words-Geometric-Concept-Space-Five in 1991. These were followed by "Ariadne's Thread" in the light of a utopia, analyzing lines and spatial organization, a project I continue to this day.
When did you decide to combine the brush and the pixel?
Recalling Eusebio Sempere, following the work done since 1991 and after attending the 2002 symposium "Graphic Art and New Technologies," organized by the Calcografía Nacional in Madrid, I felt the need to intensely experiment with the possibilities offered by science and technology, always in parallel with my pictorial work. The trace of the brushstroke is transformed into pixels that constitute a new structure of the stroke, generating and enhancing new images in chromatic and geometric combinations. This research, in turn, motivates my expression as a painter.
Tell me about the large Contemporary Art Collection for the Hotel Hospes Amérigo that you created.
It is a collection of 84 digital art pieces on canvas. It was a challenge for me and an opportunity to materialize my research through new technological media.
What does it mean to you to appear in the book La Escultura Valenciana del siglo XX (Valencian Sculpture of the 20th Century) by Juan Ángel Blasco Carrascosa?
It is a recognition of my "Combinables" proposal, without a doubt. It states that my sculpture is a spatial system formed by flat and curved shapes, in cubic and cylindrical volumes within geometric harmonies.
A sculpture of yours is located in the Plaza de San Juan in Elche, your birthplace...
It is a true honor for me. This sculpture belongs to the "Combinables-Energy-Axis" series from 2001.
Following "Ariadne's Thread" throughout your pictorial and sculptural stages is a constant link of strokes articulated in squares; tell me, is Iluminada García-Torres still in a process that is "in progress"?
"Ariadne's Thread" is the common thread of my painting and my reflections, in the systematic application of the concept so that each work maintains its growing potential. All my paintings constitute the expression of a single work, which flows toward the current of universal language. THE SEARCH FOR HARMONY THROUGH EVERY BRUSHSTROKE Enero.2009 Revista EL SALT Nº17 INSTITUTO ALICANTINO DE CULTURA JUAN GIl-ALBERT Sección "La artista y su obra" interview by Elvira Rodríguez Fernández to visual artist Iluminada García-Torres https://2009-El-Salt-n17-IAC-
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PIXELS, THE TRACE OF THE STROKE "pixel la huella del trazo" Catalogue text by JOAQUÍN SANTO MATAS 2003
Exhibition ARIADNE'S THREAD-COMBINATORICS "El Hilo de Ariadna-COMBINATORIA" by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES. Municipal Center of the Arts, Alicante. December 12-17, 2003
ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (Elche 1949) presents in this exhibition, with work from the series "ARIADNE'S THREAD-COMBINATORICS," her new stage of digital geometry with which she fully enters into experimentation with new technologies. The result is an innovative, rigorous, and coherent language that we can observe in the evolution of her work, whose genesis is found in the realism of her master Antonio López; a realism that Iluminada could continue practicing with agile ability and from which she assimilated measurement and the direct stroke—gesture.
Pablo Picasso said in a brilliant phrase that one must distinguish the painter, who is the one who paints what he sells, from the artist, who is the one who sells what he paints. And Iluminada has not commercialized her work seeking the easy sale; on the contrary, she has altered the Latin aphorism and applies a peculiar primum filosofare, deinde vivere [first philosophize, then live].
Absorbed by the sublime sculpture Ariadne that she painted on two canvases in the Prado Museum, Iluminada García-Torres attempts to untangle her creative ball of yarn to exit the labyrinth of an overwhelming plastic capacity, remembering the thread of that Cretan goddess.
Analyzing the relations of figures in the plane and in space, she drifted toward a geometric abstraction that she would assimilate, almost unconsciously, from the brief classes she received in Madrid from the fellow Alicante native Eusebio Sempere.
The traced lines, executed in a dynamic way, with a single gesture, maintain a relationship of proportionality with space, mathematics and geometry, time and light. And the origin of that continuous spatial tracing must be sought more than a decade ago in her Combinables.
It is for this reason that in her works we contemplate geometries capable of being multiplied infinitely thanks to chromatic combinations and digital processes.
ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES does not hide the connection of her art with technological advances, aware that computer science facilitates experimentation in formats different from the traditional ones. In them, she also uses as a starting point original strokes and gestures articulated in the space of squares that follow rhythmic sequences, which, in this new stage, derive into the digitalization of the gesture, thus constituting pixels as the new structure of the stroke, its trace.
Digital printing is the technique chosen by Iluminada García-Torres in the present exhibition. The results of her work on large-format canvases are surprising in this renewed version of engraving in the third millennium, these canvases being susceptible to continue being painted in successive spontaneous brushstrokes.
This exhibition, belonging to the hundred works that configure the Amérigo Collection, can be contemplated in Alicante at the Hotel of the same name. In this new framework—open or restricted space, fleeting passage, rest, and art—the geometric works of Iluminada García-Torres (what a great name for a painter) will never be mere decorative elements, but will lead us into a world of harmonies fused with Mediterranean light, where celestial and marine blues, earthy and solar ochres, and the violet tones of a dawning on the horizon—which is the line from which all forms emerge—prevail.
JOAQUÍN SANTO MATAS
Director of the Juan Gil-Albert Institute of Alicante Culture
November, 2003 Digital geometric art by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES. Exhibition "Ariadne's Thread-Combinatorics," AMÉRIGO Collection catalogue. Municipal Center of the Arts, Alicante. December 12-17, 2003. https://el-hilo-ariadna-combinatoria-by-ILUMINADA-GARCIA-TORRES/centro-municipal-artes-Alicante-2003 pixel-pixels-design.blogspot.com https://www.linkedin.com/
ARIADNE'S THREAD - COMBINATORICS (1991-2003) By ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b.Elche 1949) text and digital geometry.
One hundred works to bring color to the Old Town’s first 5-star hotel Visual Artist ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES (Elche 1949) showcases several pieces from her "Combinatoria" series, which will decorate the first luxury hotel in the city center. S. Córcoles.- ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES has spent 25 years in the world of color within the boundaries of the realist style. She was a student of the master Antonio López at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, and that experience left a mark on her work. However, today she expresses satisfaction in experimenting with new technologies, her mathematical and geometric cosmos, and her new paintings with a futuristic vision.
Iluminada García-Torres’ modern trajectory of striking colors has led her to a very specific demand. She has committed to providing one hundred works in this combinatorial style to decorate the first five-star hotel set to open in a few weeks in the city's Historic Center. This refers to the hotel currently nearing completion in the Amérigo building—a mid-19th-century structure with facades on Mayor and Altamira streets. This establishment is backed by the Hestia Hoteles business group. In doing so, the hotel group establishes itself as a promoter of an avant-garde collection, Digital Printing
In recent days, the visual artist ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES has exhibited some of these digital printing works at the Municipal Arts Center. Some of her paintings were also displayed at "La Lonja" in 2002, and one of her sculptures adorns the Plaza San Juan in Elche. For the author, her current color combinations are "windows for the imagination." digital geometry by Iluminada García-Torres. Text by Santiago Córcoles Dec 17, 2003 ALICANTE NEWS
pixel-pixels-design.blogspot.com 2003
Contemporary art for a 19th-century hotel
HÉCTOR FERNÁNDEZ ■ ALICANTE LAS PROVINCIAS 05.30.2004
Paintings in hotels are usually an accessory element to the decoration, no matter if the establishment has one, two, or even five stars.
The Hotel Amérigo, which will inaugurate this week 80 luxury rooms in the historic center of Alicante, between Mayor and Altamira streets, has approached its decoration in a very different way than usual. A year and a half ago, those in charge commissioned the artist from Elche, ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES, to create a hundred different paintings to set the mood for the spaces of the hotel located in a building from the mid-19th century. Iluminada offered Hestia Hoteles the possibility of carrying out one of her most longed-for projects: developing a collection of her series Ariadne’s Thread with computer treatments of digital printing. The hotel accepted the proposal, which has taken shape in the Amérigo Collection. Since then, Iluminada García-Torres has created a hundred works to decorate the Hotel Amérigo, which will open this week in the center of Alicante.
Ariadne’s Thread is a project that Iluminada has been developing since 1991.
The artist from Alicante studied Fine Arts at the San Fernando Academy in Madrid (class of 1965-1970). She worked immersed in neo-realist currents, greatly influenced by painters Antonio López and later by Eusebio Sempere. In 1986-87, while painting two canvases of the Roman sculpture "Sleeping Ariadne" in the Prado Museum, she became aware of the compositional qualities of the 2nd-century AD marble piece. "I understood," points out the visual artist, "that the relationships between the points of the sculpture could be defined with numbers, with distances, with segments, which are spatio-temporal coordinates." It was thus that the painter's reflection led her to initiate three lines of experimental work in the languages of painting, sculpture, and the interaction of words.
Ariadne’s harmony, the artist points out, "evokes a geometric and mathematical universe that I interpret in a poetic way upon what I have come to define as the square matrix universe." Lines, free spaces, words, and points manifest themselves on the structure, giving rise to infinite "combinables".
The paintings created for the Hotel Amérigo represent a further step in the research. "The coincidence with new computer technologies has allowed me the creation of large-format canvases conceived in the form of lines and strokes for more than a decade," explains Iluminada, while also commenting on the need to be rigorous with the method she has created.
The province of Alicante has been an exceptional witness during these 13 years to the development of Iluminada's works in the exhibition halls of the Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Elche, in the Houses of Culture of several towns, in the Eusebio Sempere Center of the Juan Gil-Albert Alicante Institute of Culture, and even in the Municipal Exhibition Hall LA LONJA in Alicante, which in 2002 hosted an ambitious retrospective of the artist born in Elche in 1949.
Fate has willed that the progress in the works of ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES should be linked to the building that embodied the architectural progress of Alicante in the 19th century. The indiano José Gabriel Amérigo, upon returning to his native Alicante, planned the first civil residential building for tenants in Alicante. What will become, as of this week, the Hotel Amérigo, has been rehabilitated upon that construction which faces Mayor and Altamira streets through respective ironwork gates and which, in turn, occupied the Convent of Santo Domingo before the Mendizábal confiscation in 1835. The chromatic combinatorics, the sequences of lines and segments, and the strokes of Iluminada can be admired in the spaces of the Hotel Amérigo of Alicante.
HÉCTOR FERNÁNDEZ ■ ALICANTE LAS PROVINCIAS 05.30.2004
art critic by Dámaso Santos Amestoy for the ABC Cultural supplement: Solo exhibition "THE THREAD OF ARIADNE 1991-2002" by ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES (Elche, 1949) at the LA LONJA Municipal Gallery in ALICANTE. Colective Exhibition "Des´de la otra riva" at the Museum of Contemporary Art of EIVISSA (MACE) in July 2002 and the MACE Museum in Elche-ELX in September 2002.
Nearly fifteen years ago, the dream of the brave and ingenious Ariadne fascinated a painter who was spinning the thread of a singular geometric proposal. Iluminada García-Torres had been practicing a painting of virtuous realistic technique, right on the edge of what was about to become the prolific neo-metaphysical movement current today. One day, at the Museo del Prado, she discovered the statue of the sleeping Ariadne, of which she painted several dreamlike and "metaphysical" versions. At that time, she was creating realistic paintings based on motifs as abstract as cylinders and prisms, which would later transition into her sculptural work. This retrospective offers brief testimony to both. It indicates—as Meyer Schapiro once taught—the continuity of abstract painting with the preceding figurative art, including that of one’s own authorship.
The "Ariadne’s Thread" that Iluminada declares in the title of this exhibition leads us to painting itself. It stitches together, if no longer the labyrinth, a reverberating imaginary space. Rows of squares with regular yet sensitive lines modulate the two-dimensional plane; the edges remain indifferent to the extension of those infinite brushstroke-threads, along which the painting is woven. These contrast the corporal and psychological trace of the ductus with the geometry of rational order. Through a dialogue of repetition and difference, of seriality and tonality, she conjures the fullness of modern painting so that the work—as Klee used to say—does not remain merely "a good carpet," but is capable of summoning the real presence of a third dimension without illusionist artifice. ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES (Elche, 1949) weaves the tapestry of dreams, the tapestry of Ariadne’s dreams. Dámaso Santos Amestoy ABC Cultural Madrid, 06/01/2002 No. 540 https://Museu-Art-Contemporani-de-EIVISSA-y-ELCHE-ELX-exposicion-Desde-la-Altra-Riba-participa-ILUMINADA-GARCIA-TORRES-2002 numerical-design.blogspot.com 2002
GASWORKS STUDIOS, LONDON UK. Residencies ILUMINADA GARCIA TORRES (Spain) 1 December 1998 – 1 March 1999 This is the first time you will see the work of the visual artist ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES in the United Kingdom. During her residency at GASWORKS, she has produced new works with the referent of the marble sculpture ARIADNE at the MUSEO del PRADO, in MADRID, «I discovered that the harmony she invoked fitted perfectly a geometrical and mathematical pattern, which now guides me through my way of working.»
ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES seeks to achieve harmony through the expression of the moment, constituted by line-space-time, within proportional relationships between structures. The singularity of each line is a step towards ‘Light’. Every picture constitutes the expression of a single work that flows into the current of universal language. interview published by Alessio Antoniolli 1999 GASWORKS STUDIOS, LONDON UK
https://gasworks.org.uk/residencies/iluminada-garcia-torres/#.XhjFjuwO2LE.gmail
spatial-layout.blogspot.com LONDON 1998-2000
SCIENTIFIC, LITERARY AND ARTISTIC ATENEUM of ALICANTE
TEXT by MARIBEL BERNÁ BOX President of the Scientific, Literary and Artistic Ateneum of Alicante
exhibition "ARIADNE'S THREAD-MUSIC" by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES
I have known Iluminada García-Torres (Elche 1949, Alicante) for many years, the artist, who usually surprises when her works are known for the first time. Her career starts from her beginning at the School of Arts and Crafts of Alicante, her encounter with the master Antonio López at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, in the year 1965, and her relationship as a student likewise with Eusebio Sempere also leaves a mark on her. The figurative and the realism of one and the other have nothing to do with each other... but they have something in common, both impacted her, but the one from Alicante more so.
Her "Ariadne's Thread" made her integrate into a geometric abstraction integrated into the real space of the canvas shaped in those digital art works, which can be admired at the Hotel Amérigo in Alicante. I am always surprised when I see her works, and I hope those who visit this exhibition—to which the name Ariadne's Thread-Music, we can assume is a tribute to her stay and work in London—do so as well.
Computer applications and the world of music appear reflected in the work of Iluminada García-Torres that are collected in the exhibition that can be enjoyed at the Ateneo. With our gratitude to the Most Excellent Provincial Council, our congratulations to the artist.
MARIBEL BERNÁ BOX
President of the Scientific, Literary and Artistic Ateneum of Alicante
exhibition c/ Navas 32, October 7-30, 2014
iluminadagarciatorres.blogspot.com https://www.linkedin.com/posts/iluminada-garcia-torres-793189326_httpslnkdingupa5zya-1990-1990-galer%C3%ADa-activity-7243602052008833025-eJLa
The immense risk of setting out across the waves
Text by Rosa Martínez de Lahidalga. 1990
exhibition, oil paintings/canvas by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES
Galería ALBATROS, MADRID 1990
"No utility can legitimate the immense risk of setting out across the waves. To set sail, there have to be weighty interests involved. But truly weighty interests are the most chimerical."Gaston Bachelard
Across the waves. Across the spaces created to magnify silence, the passion of absence or abnegation. ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b.Elche 1949 Spain) constructs the edifice of being from the work of being. In her painting, we find the morphology she is obliged to provide for this edifice. This is the role that has been reserved for artists and poets.
Ariadne does not drown herself in the sea in desperation, as some versions of the myth would have us believe. Ariadne, the guiding light, the discloser or guardian of the mystery emerges from the depths of the ocean in serene peace. Thus we find her, stretched out over the rocks, a perfect example of classical, eternal antiquity in sculpture.
This is the Ariadne of the Prado Museum, which Velazquez brought from Rome for his king and whom he painted in his two magnificent paintings of Villa Medici, and this is the Ariadne who has captured Iluminada's imagination with her spell and led her through her own personal labyrinth. Her fascination lies in the symbol she contains, which works its own seduction, wherever the image may be. And Iluminada's painting also seduces using values that are apparently out of favour nowadays, such as exactitude, authority and tradition, which she unites with an unmistakable gift for visual and three-dimensional expression.
It is impossible when standing before her work to remove oneself from these categories, the intensity and association that is so far removed from the time-space dimension. The sculptural material becomes more real and more human than the form that contains it, whilst the colour vacillates between warmth and chill in search of a welcoming abyss. This is an aureate Ariadne, as distant and as close as a poetic dream, a figure whose mystery is so much greater than those immersed in the monumental tragedy of human centuries.
The artist interrogates the past from a very personal angle, moving in the delicate area that separates waiting from own experience. In this space, she has shed light upon the dividing line, affirming certainties whilst also taking one off on incredible flights of imagination.
All artworks are of infinite loneliness, as Rilke once said, and there is no way one can reach them through criticism. Only love can capture them and hold them as they should be held. This is what happens with these almost muralesque pictures which —probably unintentionally— belong to the metaphysical line passed down from Chirico, whose gaze was always fixed on the never-forgotten classicism of Italy. Behind the unnervingly frozen appearance, between steel tubes and cases, Iluminada recovers an entire metaphysics of space and form, a mutation of structural architecture in the articulation of reinvented columns through which light and thought flow.
One can make the simplest image, the smallest object achieve transcendence if the paintbrush and the mind are able to elevate them to the level of category. This is what occurs with these open yet hermetic cases and these blind bottles that mirror reflectant realities. Within them lie jealously guarded codes.
Those of us who know of Iluminada’s human testimony, which reveals a soul born to art, have been stunned by the beauty of these surfaces. Although beauty seems to have been devalued over the last few years, at this stage of the century it has now become evident that nothing related to art is evident. However, it is still considered art’s job to discover the need for law and order in the apparently irrational world of our experience. There can be no doubt that the reason it is so impossible to define art is that it will always be predetermined by what once was but will always acquire legitimacy only by what wishes to be or perhaps could be.
When one stands before this great set of pictures, one cannot speak of the possibility of being. All this constitutes an authentic definition that needs no name other than its own. Stealing Hölderling's words, I would be bold enough to venture the prayer that bursts forth from such diaphanous works:
"May our heart, like that of the child,
endeavour to be pure and our hands clean of any fault
and supreme in its trembling, uniting suffering
to the pain of this God, may the eternal heart
remain eternally firm."
Text by Rosa Martínez de Lahidalga 1990 Member of the Spanish Association of Art Critics. English version: Victoria Hughes
gravitationalwaves-music.blogspot.com1990
iluminadagarciatorres.blogspot.com https://www.linkedin.com/posts/iluminada-garcia-torres-793189326_httpslnkdingupa5zya-1990-1990-galer%C3%ADa-activity-7243602052008833025-
www.elhilodeariadna.net
Text by VIVIANA RODRÍGUEZ GIMENO, May 2015 catalogue
"ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES: 50 YEARS OF PICTORIAL AND DIGITAL TRAJECTORY" in the Exhibition Catalogue "Geometry, Color and Musicality" by ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES. Municipal Exhibition MACE of Elche, May 15 – September 06, 2015.
ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES (b.1949 Elche, Spain) celebrates 50 years of her pictorial work and work with digital media. It was in 1986 when her encounters with the marble sculpture of SLEEPING ARIADNE at the PRADO NATIONAL MUSEUM, Madrid, gave a new meaning to her painting. Just as quantum physicists rely on string studies to find a theory of everything, the painter ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES discovered in the mythological THREAD of Ariadne the point for her development in Geometric Art, thus finding the element that has given full meaning to her work. iluminadagarciatorres.blogspot.com
The concepts that give the exhibition its name—GEOMETRY, COLOR, and MUSICALITY—encompass the extensive work, intense dedication, and the innovative research and reflection carried out by the author, ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES.
Each line, each brushstroke, has its reason for being and makes every line unique, without losing the sense of harmony; a lucid composition and combination of color that is, in turn, incalculable; and Musicality, perhaps for the viewers the part capable of creating the apex that consummates her research task. A rhythm with vitality, EURYTHMY, which invites one to go beyond forms and colors, making it possible to glimpse the whole of that balanced geometric universe created by ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES in her paintings of CONTINUOUS SPATIAL TRACING and the digital diagrams printed on canvas ARIADNE’S THREAD - MUSICALITY, in which she shows her perception of various cities, continents, countries… SWEDEN-BEIJING-AFRICA-MADRID-GREECE-NEW YORK-MUMBAI BOMBAY-EUROPE-TOKYO-PARIS-BROOKLYN-NEPAL-BERLIN-LATIN AMERICA-UNIVERSE-… GEOMETRY, COLOR and MUSICALITY: eurythmy of renewal in Geometric Art.
Text "50 años de trayectoria pictórica y Digital" by VIVIANA RODRÍGUEZ GIMENO, may 2015, Journalism and Communication UMH, UCM. Exhibition Catalogue "Geometry, Color and Musicality" by ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES. Municipal Exhibition Center of Elche, May 15 – September 06, 2015. https://www.linkedin.com/
SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2001 | LA PRENSA MAGAZINE | 29 | Exhibition: Casa de Cultura de El Campello (Alicante) May 12 – June 20, 2001 Interview by NATALIA MOLINOS NAVARRO - SPACE AND LINE: THE INFINITY OF ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES "For the Elche-born artist ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES, Ariadne’s thread is the weave through which her geometric lines and spaces pass." Ten years working on line, space, time... Many failed to understand Iluminada García-Torres' (b. 1949 Elche, Alicante) transition from over twenty-five years of painting in the style of Antonio López (her professor at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Madrid) to a conceptual approach with a challenging aesthetic. Yet, as she explains, it is all part of a logical evolution.QUESTION: Your painting and sculpture exhibition is on display at the El Campello Cultural Center until the end of the month. Overall, the work feels highly intellectual—full of rhythm, with a minimalist air and Eastern philosophies, all rooted in geometry.
ANSWER: Yes, that’s right. There is a great deal of conceptual work prior to the act of painting, which is primarily expressed through the line. The stroke of the line is fundamental; it is a gesture. I always work from a mathematical theoretical base (1991), but then, each line becomes a work in its own right. I use the square and the cube, configured by these lines, as a base structure. However, the spaces are just as essential as the lines—perhaps more so—because space is the void, and what matters is the proportional relationship between space and line (Iluminada shows me her preliminary research: a pile of notes filled with mathematical details). My geometric work moves along two basic axes: line-space-time and structure-space-line. This is why my work is infinite in space and time. The paintings can be joined together; they make sense both individually and as a whole because they always maintain proportions that allow for this. The same interplay exists in my sculpture.
The work of ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES is the visual expression of a deep poetic and conceptual reflection born from observing and delving into her own art.
Q: Before working in this style, you did realism. How did you get here? Is human perception lost when creating such a conceptual form of painting?
A: After twenty-five years of realism, it was the study of the relationships between objects—and the space in between them—that led me to this geometric expression. There is a background of inquiry and analysis... but my current painting doesn't lose its "life" because of that. Emotions are always expressed one way or another, and now I do it through the stroke, which is direct and human. Each stroke is the instant of the action itself. Poetically, it’s a step toward the light (poetry is ever-present in Iluminada García-Torres' mathematical concepts, as seen in the El Campello exhibition catalog). You cannot erase it; you cannot correct it. However it comes out, it stays; otherwise, it wouldn't be honest.
Q: I found the sculpture section (with that spectacular use of stoneware) more innovative than the painting. The painting feels more neutral, whereas in the ceramics we see more contrasts.
A: There may be more artists interested in this type of painting now, but when I started ten years ago, it was unheard of. Furthermore, I arrived here through a logical process driven by the evolution of my work. For the people who had followed me until then, it was a shock, and it was hard for me. I was recognized as a realist, and it took time for the change to be understood. It was like starting over. But while painting two canvases of the sculpture Sleeping Ariadne at the Prado Museum, everything I had learned—and everything I hadn't yet understood—suddenly made sense. The honest thing to do was to dare to take this path and go deeper into it. Observing the Sleeping Ariadne, I realized everything can be synthesized into geometry and mathematics. It’s a new language, but it means the same thing; it is realism in its most essential points. Even before this stage, I was already interested in geometric forms like cylinders and cubes through realism. Without realizing it, I was already on a different path. The sculpture and ceramics emerged from these inquiries quite naturally.
Q: Iluminada, how would you like your work to be understood?
A: I want people to be moved when they see it. I want them to understand that it possesses an infinite concept, where all the canvases form a single painting. I want someone who owns an individual piece to feel that it is part of a much larger whole. Exhibition: Continuous Spatial tracing - Ariadne’s Thread (Painting, Combinables, Ceramics by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES Casa de Cultura de El Campello (Alicante) May 12 – June 20, 2001
QUESTION: Your painting and sculpture exhibition is on display at the El Campello Cultural Center until the end of the month. Overall, the work feels highly intellectual—full of rhythm, with a minimalist air and Eastern philosophies, all rooted in geometry.
ANSWER: Yes, that’s right. There is a great deal of conceptual work prior to the act of painting, which is primarily expressed through the line. The stroke of the line is fundamental; it is a gesture. I always work from a mathematical theoretical base (1991), but then, each line becomes a work in its own right. I use the square and the cube, configured by these lines, as a base structure. However, the spaces are just as essential as the lines—perhaps more so—because space is the void, and what matters is the proportional relationship between space and line (Iluminada shows me her preliminary research: a pile of notes filled with mathematical details). My geometric work moves along two basic axes: line-space-time and structure-space-line. This is why my work is infinite in space and time. The paintings can be joined together; they make sense both individually and as a whole because they always maintain proportions that allow for this. The same interplay exists in my sculpture.
The work of ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES is the visual expression of a deep poetic and conceptual reflection born from observing and delving into her own art.
Q: Before working in this style, you did realism. How did you get here? Is human perception lost when creating such a conceptual form of painting?
A: After twenty-five years of realism, it was the study of the relationships between objects—and the space in between them—that led me to this geometric expression. There is a background of inquiry and analysis... but my current painting doesn't lose its "life" because of that. Emotions are always expressed one way or another, and now I do it through the stroke, which is direct and human. Each stroke is the instant of the action itself. Poetically, it’s a step toward the light (poetry is ever-present in Iluminada García-Torres' mathematical concepts, as seen in the El Campello exhibition catalog). You cannot erase it; you cannot correct it. However it comes out, it stays; otherwise, it wouldn't be honest.
Q: I found the sculpture section (with that spectacular use of stoneware) more innovative than the painting. The painting feels more neutral, whereas in the ceramics we see more contrasts.
A: There may be more artists interested in this type of painting now, but when I started ten years ago, it was unheard of. Furthermore, I arrived here through a logical process driven by the evolution of my work. For the people who had followed me until then, it was a shock, and it was hard for me. I was recognized as a realist, and it took time for the change to be understood. It was like starting over. But while painting two canvases of the sculpture Sleeping Ariadne at the Prado Museum, everything I had learned—and everything I hadn't yet understood—suddenly made sense. The honest thing to do was to dare to take this path and go deeper into it. Observing the Sleeping Ariadne, I realized everything can be synthesized into geometry and mathematics. It’s a new language, but it means the same thing; it is realism in its most essential points. Even before this stage, I was already interested in geometric forms like cylinders and cubes through realism. Without realizing it, I was already on a different path. The sculpture and ceramics emerged from these inquiries quite naturally.
Q: Iluminada, how would you like your work to be understood?
A: I want people to be moved when they see it. I want them to understand that it possesses an infinite concept, where all the canvases form a single painting. I want someone who owns an individual piece to feel that it is part of a much larger whole. Exhibition: Continuous Spatial tracing - Ariadne’s Thread (Painting, Combinables, Ceramics by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES Casa de Cultura de El Campello (Alicante) May 12 – June 20, 2001
numerical-design.blogspot.com 2002 diagram-musicality.logspot.com
INFORMACIÓN Friday, August 11, 2006 CULTURE 59 TRIBUNA Text by MANUEL PARRA POZUELO — LOS DESTELLOS DE LA UTOPIA. After thirty years of navigating the stormy seas of geometries capable of being multiplied to infinity—thanks to chromatic combinations and digitalization processes—ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b. 1949 Elche, Alicante) has arrived at the island that Thomas More baptized with the name of Utopia.
Her arrival has been made possible by her intense and innovative study of space, plane, line, and color, in an ascetic, continuous, and coherent process. By following Ariadne's thread, she has managed to escape the labyrinth of reality and settle into the image of the purest and most uncontaminated painting at the goal of digital art. Here, space and line reveal a new expression of their powerful potential, in a place where chaotic living acquires a rational and balanced dimension. Such is the scope and atmosphere achieved by Iluminada García-Torres in the works currently on display at the Territorial College of Architects of Alicante, in Plaza Gabriel Miró, until September 7th, following the mandatory break for the August holidays.
The extensive career of Iluminada García-Torres began in the strictest and most absolute realism at the hands of her never-forgotten master, Antonio López, in the Madrid of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts during the 1960s. She later embarked on her most personal path with an abstract stage she called "Ariadne's Thread," which she also subtitled, in its pictorial version, "Continuous Spatial Layout." These square structures, in which geometric lines and spaces of diverse and combined colors appear, provide an exact idea of that music which underlies the deepest and most authentic dreams and sensations.
These works—also featured at the Lonja del Pescado in Alicante in her exhibition "Ariadne’s Thread: Painting 1991–2002"—alongside the sculpture titled "Combinables" (a spatial articulation of flat forms, curves, and voids integrating the developments of the cube and cylinder, based on the study of spatial geometry), are the fruit of her capacity for concentration, synthesis, perseverance, and subtlety. We are speaking of an artistic stage that was already presented in Alicante in 1993 under the sponsorship of the Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, showcasing an equally harmonious relationship between the strictest geometry and mathematical order on one hand, and poetic reason and the human heartbeat on the other.
It is worth noting that in 1996, ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES received the "Carlos Haes" Painting Prize, awarded in Madrid by the College of Civil Engineers. She was also selected for the Villa de Madrid Painting and Sculpture Awards in 1996 and 1997, as well as the L'Oréal Painting Prize in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 2001, and 2002, leading to the exhibition of her works at the Conde Duque Cultural Center in Madrid.ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES stands at the goal of digital art, where space and line reveal a new expression of their potential.
In 1997, during her stay in London, ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES was invited by Gasworks Studios, and in 2000, she exhibited at the Hortensia Art Gallery of Kensington & Chelsea College in London. Upon her return to Spain, she displayed her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Elche, the same city where, in 2002, she installed her sculpture "Combinables: Energy Axis" in the Plaza de San Juan.
In her canvases—born from her fascination with the "SLEEPING ARIADNE" sculpture, which she observed and painted in two oil works (1986-87) at the PRADO MUSEUM—she was able to build a geometric and mathematical cosmos. She reached that non-existent yet essential place where one attains the beatific harmony denied to us by the mundanity of reality. Through the union of rational poetics and expressive gesture, Iluminada García-Torres has captured a dimension in her digital art canvases that brings color to every room of the Hotel Hospes Amérigo, proving its perfect compatibility with the spaces of this emblematic 21st-century building in our city.
In her search for Utopia, Iluminada García-Torres also turns toward herself through her lines, pixels, and colors. In doing so, she ensures the abstraction of her painting is not only geometric and logical substance, but also—and above all—a human heartbeat and poetic vibration. Much like the voyage to Ithaca, the journey itself is as important, if not more so, than the final destination. She knows that the process toward an ever-unreachable (yet undeniable) goal generates those flashes—that transition toward the singular emotion of the essential. The public now has the opportunity to witness this in the exhibition of ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES's work titled "Ariadne’s Thread: Utopia in Progress," featuring her latest geometric research and essential inquiries into the field of new technologies, presented by the Territorial College of Architects of Alicante. CTAA.
Text by MANUEL PARRA POZUELO, 2006
Exhibition by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES at the Territorial College of Architects of Alicante
iluminadagarciatorres.blogspot.com
ILLUMINATED BY ART
Text by Joaquín Santo Matas (2009)
ILUMINADA GARCIA TORRES (Elche, Spain, 1949). In 1967, in Madrid, she was a student of drawing professor Cristóbal Toral, while also becoming a disciple—in two stages, 1965 and 1984—of the hyperrealist painter Antonio López García. Although she knew how to assimilate the teachings of her masters, she has established a perfectly defined style with evolutionary stages that might seem drastic, yet are full of absolute coherence.
A long-time resident of Alicante, we can now contemplate the excellent exhibition "Retrospective of ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES, 1982-2009" at the Santa Bárbara Castle. This collection allows us to absorb the mature expressive strength that emanates from her work. Her landscapes and quince fruit show her beginnings as a realist painter; later, in 1984—a time of seduction—she discovered the Hellenistic sculpture of "Ariadne Sleeping" in Naxos at the Prado Museum. She would capture this figure in oil from various perspectives, claiming its harmony "codifies a cosmos, both geometric and mathematical."
The great innovative contribution of ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES arrived in 1991. While geometric abstraction had found its master in Eusebio Sempere, she—through her mathematical and geometric research titled COMBINABLES—links geometry and measurement with the direct impact of the brushstroke within the field of analytical art. This "assertion of energy in every stroke" breaks away from strict, precise lines.
She then began working in silk-screen printing, and the National Library now holds eighteen of her prints produced in 1996. This technique, so widely used in Pop Art and by kinetic artists, served as a bridge toward her interest in digital art. ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES is very clear that the investigation of geometric forms and color through computer applications does not diminish creative capacity; rather, it provides new possibilities and what she calls the "democratization of art."
This refers to the public’s access to a work through the author’s own reproduction using new technological means, without losing a shred of quality or the original colors. Although this concept might invite controversy, she believes a change in mentality is necessary—a new way of looking at contemporary Electronic Art. She argues that just as technical advances allowed a musical piece to be reproduced on a record or a literary text in a book without devaluing the authors, these means have made it possible for art to be known or acquired without having to attend a concert or read a manuscript.
The Hotel H. Amérigo in Alicante holds a collection of nearly one hundred works of Digital Geometric Art created by ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES, offering a chance to contemplate suggestive geometries printed on canvas with innovative combinatorics. In 2003, I had the immense honor of writing the text "PIXELS: THE TRACE OF THE STROKE" for the exhibition catalogue of this collection. Today, I reaffirm my sentiments of admiration: "a world of harmonies fused with Mediterranean light."
Text by Joaquín Santo Matas Diario LA VERDAD, Alicante, 10-18-09
ILUMINADA GARCIA TORRES: Retrospective 1982-2009 Exhibition at Santa Bárbara Castle, ALICANTE
musicalidad-numerica.blogspot.com 2004Valencia
thethreadofariadne-musicality.blogspot.com 2014
https://ariadne-thread-music-
numerical-design.blogspot.com 2002
ALICANTE / EL MUNDO Daily – August 29, 2001 Painter Iluminada García-Torres returns to Alicante and finalizes her sculpture in Elche. When every moment hangs by a thread. Text by MARTIN SANZ. 2001 ALICANTE.— It was the first day of the rest of her life, but ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b. Elche, 1949) did not know it. She perceived that everything was going to change, that she had reached a level and that the question was not to evolve, but to do something different.
It was ten years ago, when ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES inaugurated her exhibition at the Albatros Gallery in Madrid (1990). She abandoned figuration to its fate, left behind the teachings of Antonio López, and captured the thread of abstraction. She discovered the "Sleeping Ariadne" at the Prado Museum. The painter from Elche wanted to contemplate the restored Las Meninas, but she got hooked again on the sculpture of Ariadne. "I wasn't interested in the myth, only in the conjunction of its subtlety and power. I painted it (1986-87) on one canvas looking at it from the front and then on another canvas its back, and it marked the turning point." From there, to the search for the harmony of its essence.
A couple of solo exhibitions in Alicante, two years of work and exhibitions in London, and the time comes to take the pulse of the province. First, in a few weeks, she will be an exceptional witness to the installation of one of her sculptures in the Plaza de las Flores in Elche. And the constant feeling of ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES that during the last decade the approach upon which her geometric art works rest was set and "everything turned out well, it coincided, everything came together."
The important thing is the tracing of the line. Let it be a single brushstroke with different sizes and thicknesses. Every line spacing is calculated. "It is the action, it is the moment; each line corresponds to an instant and, although they can have several interpretations, the strokes are united by a relationship of spatial proportion that in turn ensures each stroke is unique."
There are those who say she should speak with a musician who would interpret the paintings of ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES as if they were staff lines. Vicente Verdú wrote (2000) of her series as the music of the DNA of sculpture. They could also be biorhythm charts, each heartbeat different. But united by that "Ariadne’s Thread."
"Everything depends on the visual level of the person looking at the painting. Some question the reason for my investigation, but the sensation of measure and order prevails," opines the artist, who will exhibit in September one of her works selected for the L'Oréal Contemporary Art Prize, as has happened during recent years. The exhibition will be at the CONDE DUQUE Cultural Center in Madrid.
The idea of organizing a retrospective exhibition of her work in Alicante prevails at this moment: "I want them to know my work; I am from Alicante." She advocates for the necessity of theoretical approaches in art and does not believe in painting for painting's sake. She has neither made nor makes concessions, "because if you make them...", ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES knows that in Madrid they recognize her canvases by her tracing of the line; she studies the quantity, density, and pressure in her lines, "each line is distinct and cannot be repeated because they correspond to the gestural instant," and she concludes: "Everything is a matter of the inquiry into the initial approach, intensity."
Text by MARTIN SANZ. 2001 Diario EL MUNDO 29/08/2001. ALICANTE.
diagram-musicality.
numerical-design.blogspot.com 2002
EL MUNDO, on May 1, 2002. ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES presents her Retrospective exhibition "El hilo de Ariadna. Pintura 1991-2002", Text by Martin Sanz titled "The Necessary Light to Exit the Labyrinth". ALICANTE: at the La Lonja del Pescado Municipal Exhibition Hall in ALICANTE.– There remained two outstanding debts that have been settled at the same time. She knew that in Madrid they recognized her geometric stroke at first glance. It was also yet to be determined the exact moment in which her native Elche would incorporate one of her works into the urban furniture.
Barely a month ago she witnessed the installation of her piece COMBINABLES: Energy Axis –three meters of bronze and stainless steel– in the Plaza de San Juan of Elche, and just yesterday ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES (Elche, 1949) inaugurated in the LONJA del Pescado Municipal Gallery her exhibition Ariadne's Thread. Painting 1991-2002. In addition to twenty paintings, the space hosts another sculpture that, usually, can be contemplated in the Capa Collection of the Santa Bárbara Castle.
The story is known by those who for years considered it a matter of more than just justice that a retrospective exhibition of Iluminada García-Torres be organized in Alicante. It was in the mid-eighties when the woman from Elche visited the PRADO MUSEUM to enjoy up close the painting of Velázquez's recently restored Las Meninas. Once there, her attention was diverted again toward the sculpture of Sleeping Ariadne. She began to paint her in the Museum day after day until deciphering her essence, the same one that now presides over the room of the Lonja where the rest of the works of the exhibition rest.
It meant a flash, "the knowledge and the light necessary to exit the labyrinth. I obtained the consciousness that her harmony, an alchemy of power and subtlety that impressed me so much, provoking my fascination, was not by chance. Her harmony invoked a geometric and mathematical cosmos," points out the painter. In an exercise of concentration of forces, she managed to have those linear hieroglyphs deciphered in her studio, "in that first painting, where everything is," says Iluminada García-Torres, pointing to one of the canvases of geometric painting.
For the author, ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES “space is as important as lines, because with the representation of their tracing through a single gesture, with the expression of the instant constituted by line-space-time within the relations of proportionality, the language of sensations and concepts that I am progressively developing towards harmony is expressed,” the same one that Ariadne.
Today, her work continues along that line, “it develops and evolves because the thread is continuous.” She listens to reflections on the matter coming from the voice of her former teacher Antonio López, who taught her classes in the sixties at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts and fifteen years later at the Madrid Circle of Fine Arts. “This research is possible because of the previous twenty-five years of realism. Expressing something as I have wanted has arrived after many years and in that sense I have been very demanding. Space and line will continue and, although elementary, are essential.” ILUMINADA approaches the latest technologies, and a single reason is manifested. “They are several works, but in the end they could form a single one.” Text by Martin Sanz titled "LA LUZ NECESARIA PARA SALIR DEL LABERINTO."
https://geometria/el-Hilo-de-
numerical-design.blogspot.com 2002
"THE CAVES of ALTAMIRA and technology unite" affirms the artist ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES
Text by Sergio Balseyro - S.B. ALICANTE LA VERDAD December 17, 2003
ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES (Elche 1949, Alicante) has just shown at the Municipal Center of the Arts of Alicante "30 works that make up part of the Amérigo Collection" from her new digital stage, experimentation with new technologies. ARIADNE'S COMBINATORIAL THREAD, where she continues showing the investigation of "the direct line, the instant," a continuation of the interest in screen printing that began more than twelve years ago.
"In this exhibition she interprets previous compositions, with the technology that allows for making new contributions and demonstrates that the paintings of Caves of Altamira and new technologies unite," Iluminada García-Torres commented yesterday. In large format, she offers the possibilities of the digital work "universe" expressing "the present, in relation to space, the linear gesture that has a trajectory of which the computer provides all its information," and as a result of the process one obtains "all the chromatic richness of the straight line," she commented.
The visual artist ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES, with a Combinable sculpture that she exhibited in Alicante, is included in the "book Valencian Sculptors of the 20th Century" which will be presented tomorrow in the capital of the Turia (Valencia) and is written by Blasco Carrascosa.
Also awaiting her contribution to the National Chalcography, the visual artist admits that she would like to exhibit the entire work process to which this experimental proposal leads her and all the digital possibilities of research and expression.
exhibition ARIADNE'S COMBINATORIAL THREAD by ILUMINADA GARCIA-TORRES
at the Municipal Center of the Arts of Alicante December 12-17 December 2003
"The Art Criticism" by Antonio Zoido Díaz Badajoz. Diario HOY – April 22, 1976
Paintings by ILUMINADA G. TORRES
When verism and fidelity to the model seek to surpass reality by way of simple transcription, art is normally defeated, and the authentic truth that resides in the very nature of things emerges triumphant. A mirror image, no matter how sharp and resplendent it may appear, will never cease to be—compared to the original—a beautiful and captious artifice. It is quite another thing when aesthetic delicacy, the translating spirit of the artist, adheres to objects, plays exquisitely with them without attempting to change their structure, and leaves them illuminated. The objects do not cease to be themselves, but are magnified by a halo, like the ineffable visions arisen—with incontestable verism for eyes.
This reflection, a synthesis of what can be critically said about the work that Iluminada G. Torres offers in the Culture Halls of the Provincial Council of Badajoz at Plaza de Minayo, although it may seem an idle preamble, would suffice to explain the essential meaning of these paintings to a discerning observer.
The surprising novelty of an art such as this, which adheres to the strict and noble guidelines of acquired craftsmanship, is perfectly explained. The best of hyperrealisms—such as that of Iluminada G. Torres—does not lie so much in the continuity of its roots and modeled verisimilitude, as in the—achieved—desire to embrace the normal and everyday within auras and the magic of a meticulous and very well-studied aesthetic envelope.
To transplant the simple, humble things that concern us to the viewer's attention, it is necessary to have a finished technique and a most adroit handling of consecutive media, a fervent desire to capture them, almost with admiring devotion, inscribing their limits, colors, and profiles in an area—which, however real the things may remain—is already unreal, subjective, and undoubtedly more than seen: created.
From this condition derives the care and cultivation of contrasts, the beveled relief of the materials under interpretation—metals, ceramics, fruit wrappings—against the atmosphere and backgrounds, as persistently achieved as the apples themselves, the crystals, the flowers, the canvases, the wicker, or the model-like plastic. The exquisiteness in the clean brushwork of shadows and transparencies, the language of the folds, the tactile distillation of the petals, the lapidary anonymous reflections on simple cans, or the beautification of the humble as seen in the distinctive example of the clay pot forming an inseparable whole with its flowers, are resources combined as effectively pictorial as they are poetic. In the landscapes, the same well-founded criterion of apprehending the material and the lyrical is highlighted. The—sole—portrait on display confirms and affirms the expert and ductile technical ease that sustains this painting.
A painting of persevering effort, of operational training, of sustained will and passion, which in this, her first individual exhibition in Badajoz—for reasons of family ties—represents an indubitable success for the artist.
"The Art Criticism" by Antonio Zoido Díaz
Facsimile of art critics published in Diario HOY, 1957 to 2000.
MUBA Museum Badajoz.
Volume I, 1976 page 170/painting by ILUMINADA GARCÍA TORRES (1949 ELCHE)
ART AS A REASON FOR BEING "El arte como razón de ser" 1993
Text by José Manuel Álvarez Enjuto (Madrid, April 1993)
Exhibition Catalogue COMBINABLES by ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b.Elche1949.Alicante). The last landscapes already incorporated small inscriptions of becoming. The geometric elements had abandoned architectural compositions and functioned only as geometric matter on the canvases; quadrangular and cylindrical objects joined together, supporting and mixing with each other, one within another. It is the last link. From that moment on, the elements demanded greater forcefulness, greater space, until opening up to a new field, a field of boundlessness. Thus they arrived at volume, at the three-dimensional arrangement. Sculpture implied a radical modification in her theoretical and ornamental conjectures.
The change represented for ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES her reason for being, her motive for conduct. She left everything for the new hypothesis. Suddenly, she shut herself in her studio like an anchorite and began to work irrepressibly. She believed she had discovered the paradigm of her anxiety. The hours were all the hours of the day. There could be no rest. There could be no interferences to disturb her ideas or mislead her calculations. From the line, she took not only its straightness, nor from the curve only its displacements. From the line she reached the radius, and from the radius the diameter, and from the diameter the circumference, and from the circumference the square, and from the square the combinables, and from the combinables back to painting, to its evolution, its progress, its metamorphosis from nothingness to being.
Now then, this numerical and geometric arrangement is also enhanced by the gesture of poetics, the secret word. It is then that she approaches the word. Word in identical repetition as the figures. In neat union with the combinatorial variations. Word as an absence of painting. Arithmetic as order, as solitude, as silence, as axiom.
Painting—and even more so for a painter like Iluminada García-Torres—could not disappear from her canvases. ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES is NOT a painter who can do without her soul, and her soul is painting, the joy of painting. The latest works evidence this, manifest it so; and painting, which never ceased to be such but unfolded through different paths, the experimentation and exploration of her quintupled lines, retakes its pristine gesture and debates it with the topological. Unfading values. And in that doubt that is not doubt, ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES dialogues, wrapped and unwrapped around her straight divisions, her indisputable formalisms, her candor through words. Completely devoted to her task. To herself. Under her arm, she carried one of those quadrangular notebooks. https://catalogo/COMBINABLES-
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"FASCINATION WITH SPACE" is a text written by M. Carmen África Vidal Claramonte for the COMBINABLES exhibition by Iluminada García Torres, published in the Diario INFORMACIÓN Daily Newspaper of Alicante on June 10, 1993.
The CAM has offered in its hall at Avenida Oscar Esplá 37, an exhibition worth seeing. It concerns the work of Iluminada García Torres (Elche 1949, Alicante), born in Elche and today settled in Madrid. At first glance, what she offers us is very simple: there are paintings from a first period, apparently realistic, deeply metaphysical. And others from a stage that begins its journey precisely in Alicante: paintings that are almost sculptures.
Iluminada García is fascinated by space, and in it she plays with two basic elements in her painting, the square and the circle, the cube and the cylinder. In the previous, more realistic paintings, one glimpses, nevertheless, the obsession with geometric form and with space: the inevitable attraction of the Salinas series forces us to reflect on solitude, on silence, on our own soul; and the wonderful painting she exhibits of Sleeping Ariadne painted from behind, looks at the infinite, perhaps toward the inside of ourselves.
From there, one passes to the paintings constructed with lines and points, with rectangles that have been painted with a single stroke, and, thus, none is equal, all are different. Identity, repetition, and diversity at one time. At times, she leaves space between the rectangles, spaces that the observer will be able to fill with their own experiences: the paintings remain infinitely open to varied interpretations like the observers themselves.
The only sculpture in the room is a very small sample of the work carried out by the visual artist in that field. Continuing with squares and cylinders, with the mathematical accuracy of the measurements, but at the same time with the tolerance of the gaps, she constructs a sculpture that is born from her approach to objects as everyday as boxes or cubes that serve as her reference.
But in addition to creating painting and sculpture, Iluminada García-Torres is also capable of composing poems.
And, most importantly, that interdisciplinary character of the work arises from the same aesthetic concept.
The excellent catalog that accompanies the exhibition shows how ILUMINADA GARCIA TORRES uses language in her cubes, thus composing poems again open to infinite readings.
COMBINABLES exhibition by Iluminada García Torres
The exhibition took place at the Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo in Alicante from May 5 to June 9, 1993.
net-squares-lines.blogspot.com 2000 iluminadagarciatorres.blogspot.com
www.elhilodeariadna.net diagram-musicality.
© Diario Información. Doctor Rico, 17 - 03005 ALICANTE PAINTING: An exhibition illustrates the transition toward abstraction J. P. 9/5/2000 Starting today, the Elche Municipal Exhibition Center presents the exhibition CONTINUOUS SPATIAL TRACING - ARIADNE’S THREAD by ILUMINADA GARCIA TORRES (Elche, 1949), featuring the work of one of the artists least known by her fellow citizens. After several years in Madrid and London, she returns to her birthplace to showcase her artistic evolution following the painting of two canvases ten years ago the "Sleeping Ariadne" sculpture at the Prado Museum as a model for her paintings. Since then, her work has moved away from figures and realism to delve into the world of geometric abstraction.
The fascination that the sculpture of Ariadne still holds for Iluminada García Torres led her to embark on a path seeking simplification and essentiality, reaching its highest degree: the point and the line. "Each stroke is unique and different from the others because it corresponds to a single moment," she explains. From this arises one of the core concepts of her painting: line-space-time.
Her work arrives in Elche after being exhibited in London in January, which the artist described as "a frankly interesting experience." The evolution of her work can be observed through 17 silkscreen prints, 13 geometric abstract works, six figurative paintings, and five other abstracts presented at the Municipal Exhibition Center of ELX-ELCHE from May 5 to 31, 2000. The exhibition opens today at 7:00 PM. Exhibition: CONTINUOUS SPATIAL TRACING - ARIADNE’S THREAD (2000) by ILUMINADA GARCIA TORRES (Elche, 1949) http://www.diarioinformacion.com/infhoy0056/elche/15Elche.html
drawings-line.blogspot.com 1994-97
The mentioned sculpture is the Sleeping Ariadne (2nd century AD) a Roman classical sculpture of marble, in the Prado Museum, Madrid.
- If the elements—point, line, and the generated figures—are represented in the structures, these, in relation to the free space, contain the concept of the filled. I shall call this relationship: filled space. When the space is determined by the non-representation of elements, partially or totally, it means that the void is consciously and deliberately expressed. Consequently, I value this space as: void space.
- The concepts of the void and the filled in their own expression, and that originated in their relationship—whether by one, several, or all of the following causes: color, shape, number, direction, sense, etc., both of the elements represented in the structures of filled space and by the significance of the void space—produce, as an effect, a space of energy around them. This energy released between opposites, once harmony is reached between both, is: harmonic space. The containing space will be: open space. Open space has an infinite essence, an unlimited nature, and lacks structures. Lacking structures, it lacks harmony, but it can be structured and harmonic through creation. FREE SPACE • FILLED SPACE • VOID SPACE • HARMONIC SPACE • OPEN SPACE
- Spontaneously, from the first painting I ever made, I established a proportional relationship between the width of the drawn lines, the intermediate spaces between them, and also with: the resulting spaces between both ends of the lines, the space preceding the first line, the space following the last line, the sides of the structures. I have attributed to each of these spaces half of the measurement given to the intermediate spaces between the lines. Therefore, the union of the four expressed spaces, with those corresponding to the immediate structures, will form a single space of the same measurement as the intermediate spaces. The length of the lines is determined by the measurement of the spaces between the ends of the lines and the sides of the structure.
- In the structures, the space following the last line will join with the space preceding the first line, and the lower space with the upper space of the following structures / vice versa. Therefore, depending on whether the stroke of the lines is vertical or horizontal, their location in each structure and their relationship with the other structures, these will be on the right or the left, above or below. Thus developing a "Continuum" of spaces and lines with the successive structures. If we make consecutive subdivisions to the structures and the represented lines... the line being a continuous succession of points, the manifestation of the ultimate consequence of the "universe matrix square" will agree with the first: the point.
- I consider the first and the last of the spaces to be equal, both the upper and the lower, or the one on the right and the one on the left.
- Estimating the interaction of the spaces in the structure by: the relationship they establish with the elements • their magnitudes • the content of their meaning • the harmony between opposites • originating a single space from the fusion of the spaces, upper and lower, the one on the right with the one on the left and vice versa, for the generation of successive structures, from the "universe matrix square" which, being open and dynamic, evolves towards the expansion of itself, creating new spaces in continuum...
ILUMINADA GARCÍA-TORRES (b.1949, Spain) visual artist, studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and the UCM (1965-1970) in Madrid, where she was a student of the geometric painter Eusebio Sempere.
numerical-design.blogspot.com 2002
pixel-pixels-design.blogspot.com 2003
Mª Iluminada García-Torres
Paseo de Goya 21, esc D, bajo B
28932 Móstoles, Madrid
Iluminada García-Torres. studio
MADRID+34 696302487 digital geometría
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