True to her distinctive artistic language, Astrid Sommer presents a new body of work that brings together her signature large-scale canvases with medium- and smaller-format paintings.

The exhibition unfolds through a visual language defined by intense, vibrant colour, evocative of her Mexican heritage and infused with an infectious joie de vivre. Her compositions retain their characteristic density, embracing a compelling horror vacui through restless brushwork and energetic, gestural strokes that send mesmerising rivulets of colour cascading across the canvas.

Yet, within this exuberant interplay of colour and movement, a subtle shift begins to emerge. Several works introduce enigmatic areas of emptiness that interrupt the visual density, creating moments of pause and opening up new spatial possibilities. This contrast between expressive abundance and unexpected openness lends the series a renewed sense of freedom, hinting at an evolving pictorial language and the prospect of new artistic explorations.

THE SOURCES OF MNEMOSYNE

A work of art as an object-source of memory can thus become an object-source for new artistic works that may fertilise other memories.

Before a painting appears, there already exist colours, forms, spaces, images, gestures, techniques, the works we have seen and the experiences we have accumulated. The artist selects, transforms, relates and reorganises materials that belong to a shared, institutionalised world.

In Astrid Sommer’s previous exhibition, we spoke precisely of the weave, the warp and the interweaving of revived facts, of that which no longer remains concealed and reveals itself within another unexpected reality, reappearing under another, intentionally abstract form. Painting could then be understood as a surface upon which colours, forms and experiences are related somewhere between the artist’s body and studio, and reappear transformed into other object-sources that will surprise the memory of the attentive observer, awake to the complex and dispersed.

This new exhibition now extends that perspective from another place, that of Memory as the “Source of Sources”. Let me explain. The mythical-natural faculties of Mnemosyne should not here be understood simply as the recollection of past and personal events. The Titaness who personifies Memory and who was the mother of the nine Muses in Mediterranean culture (Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Erato, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania) allows us to think of something far more transcendental, of all that which remains after having been lived and made into an object-source for other memories.

A form that we have seen may reappear years later, transformed. A colour may become associated with a sensation. A texture may remain within our perception, even though we may have forgotten where we encountered it. A particular combination of lines, spaces and rhythms may return to us without our knowing exactly where it comes from. Memory does not preserve images alone; it preserves relationships, and these have to do with the Truth of the Logos.

We may imagine these relationships as a weave, as a stroma, a warp, a network in which each element acquires new possibilities through its relationship with the others. Something similar occurs within our perceptual experience. That which we have seen, learned or lived does not necessarily remain isolated, but may become reconnected in different, new, unexpected ways (creative, one might say).

Sommer’s paintings emanate from that source. That is why Astrid’s abstraction does not entail moving away from the world. On the contrary, it implies reorganising our true relationship with it through an abstract terminology, deliberately nematological (intricate).

In her works, a line may cease to be the contour of something in order to become direction; a mark may abandon any figurative reference and acquire a spatial function; a colour may cease to describe an object and become a presence; a weave may simultaneously suggest depth, surface, fabric or movement. Painting thus constructs a space in which relationships matter as much as the elements that constitute them, becoming an object for memory (soul, mind, psyche) that will inevitably influence the worldview of whoever stops to look at it or merely pauses to explore it. This capacity of the artistic object as a source for memory is called an artistic object-source, or psychonoematic object. The expression may appear complex, precisely because it is unfamiliar, but the idea is clear and we shall attempt to convey it.

Let us consider a work of art as a material artistic object-source, from which sensations, impressions, relationships, maps… emanate, and which, once represented through the artist’s thaumaturgy, becomes a present object, there before us, a noema, a product of the author’s psyche… a psychonoematic object that will affect me to the extent that the sensitivity of my memory admits the infinitude of the artistic constructions of the world.

The paintings in this exhibition remain before us as something almost independent of their author and are rich sources of novel reality for the psyche, the soul or the memory of those who are not the author herself. In that act of observation, we do not receive Astrid’s memory. We cannot enter into her recollections or reconstruct exactly what lay behind each pictorial decision. What we receive is something else: a possibility of setting our own relationships in motion, revitalising our coordinates in the presence of the lived experience represented in the abstract.

One spectator may recognise a form that reminds them of another, in an act of pareidolia. Another may become obsessed with a particular chromatic combination. Someone may experience a sensation of emptiness, or saturation, or simply find that, after lingering before the painting for some time, they begin to look differently at a surface, a fabric, a shadow or an architectural form. The painting is the same. The vision as a source that stirs memory is not. And precisely there seems to lie the power of a work of art, in its capacity to renew (or not) the coordinates within which the human being moves through the world.

In that exhibition, the weave appeared, that which is interwoven, concealed and revealed. In this one, the memory of the weave appears, that which remains of what has been lived and may once again be related, transformed and converted into a new configuration. Between the two exhibitions there is, therefore, the same interest in that which does not immediately present itself before our eyes. But now the question changes. It is no longer merely a matter of asking ourselves what reality lies concealed behind the painting, but also what new relationships the painting may bring forth before us.

That could be the ultimate meaning of these Sources of Mnemosyne: not merely to preserve within the real objects of art that which has been created, but to keep open the possibilities of recomposing them anew, with the talent that emanates from the sources of the inspired artist, renewed.

Roberto Ballesteros

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About ASTRID SOMMER ARTIST