PENELOPE´S ODYSSEY

Solo exhibition of Mexican artist Astrid Sommer, curated by Conchi Alvarez

In these confusing and unruly times in which creators sometimes feel overwhelmed by reality, the solution may exist in the everlasting example of Penelope. Yes, the Greek queen of Homer’s Odyssey, the epic poem that describes the return journey home from the Trojan War of the Achaean King Ulysses, or Odysseus. This exhibition highlights the astuteness of the protagonist, King of Ithaca, and his beautiful wife Penelope, who is a paradigm of marital fidelity during the long wait for her husband’s return home.

The Odyssey narrates the ruse that Penelope used to avoid marrying one of the many suitors who seized the palace, longing to occupy the throne of Ithaca. After the Trojan War, which lasted 10 years and in which her husband, Odysseus, took part, all the Achaeans returned home, except for him, who took another 10 years to return.  Penelope’s ploy consisted in setting the date for choosing a husband as the day on which she would finish weaving the mortuary robe for her father-in-law, Laertes. Each day, Penelope would weave during the daytime and then secretly unweave it at night.

Penelope is an attractive figure, both in the role of the intelligent, dedicated, submissive wife, and in the many theses that have been put forward scrutinising the character, with some in the opposite direction, or with extreme feminist approaches.

In this exhibition, this proposal uncovers the inner journey of this Greek, of her personal Odyssey, sustaining that not only did she unweave in the night, but also painted her dreams, and then hid them.

In this monotony of weaving and then undoing her work every night, given that the task of unweaving is faster than that of weaving, Penelope needed to paint as a pure survival strategy. In Astrid’s paintings there is an identification with the mythological character. As N. Benegas wrote, it affirms that the woman who waits, notes an inner emptiness and the need to flee. All the shadows of marital deception, backbiting and gossip lead this wife to pour her frustration onto the canvas, a painting for each betrayal, for each seduction, for each deceit and for each forgetfulness. An escape route from the awareness that Ulysses has become a failure, the anti-hero.

Rapid strokes reflect the anger and the resentment of Penelope, inhabiting the canvas, along with the brushstrokes to reflect the resigned acceptance in which this spouse can identify herself with the filmic phrase ‘We’ll always have Ithaca` which she repeats over and over again. This Ithaca that fleetingly existed, stolen by an absurd war.

The necessity for introspection, a journey to her own inner being, has converted the painter’s studio, in Mexico DF, into her own Ithaca, because as the poet Francisca Aguirre justly wrote: “¿Y quién alguna vez no estuvo en Ítaca?”/ ‘And who has never been to Ithaca?’

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