La Silla es el Pretexto, homenaje a Luis Barragán by Alfonso Alfaro

An empty chair always evokes an absence. But an evoked absence does not always signify loss, because there are distant shadows and faint echoes that may still inspire very intense pleasure, dying embers as warm and bright as an eternally burning fire.

A childhood friendship, secret attachments, loves so long and deep they have transformed the shape of our lips and heart-all of these fit into the former category.

This is why there can be emptiness without grief, a gentle and gratifying sense of longing, bonds so strong that the lovers never doubt their paths will cross again.

Objects are emblematic of this calm security, of absence without anguish: the simple, domestic, everyday chair, whose materials and shape make it so discreet and usually invisible due to its constant familiarity.

Its back and arms, that have so often sheltered the cherished body, receptacles always ready to offer peace and rest, a kind, silent company that fosters detachment, daydreaming and conversation; and also prayer. The chairs Luis Barragán used to furnish his houses could easily belong to a totally unpretentious rural home, but they could also be part of the furnishings that welcome parishioners and pilgrims under the shadowy magnificence of ojival vaults lit only by the glimmer of gems that shine in the stained glass of Gothic churches.

Thanks to the balance of their open planes, their simple lines, their strictly perpendicular composition, these art objects bring the greatest of luxuries to the banal, toilsome days of the rank and file (and the privileged days of artists): that of harmony.

Chairs are not a universal item of furniture. In most societies rooted to the earth and tradition, the natural stance of the body at rest is a crouching pose or similar postures, like those Japanese or Bedouins adopt while sharing a meal. In the West chairs have been a symbol of authority for millennia ("chair" is the etymological origin of words such as headquarters, presidency...) and also a gendered item. Until the seventeenth century, according to the Hispanic world's aristocratic custom, its (rigid, austere) structure was the exclusive property of men, while women usually lay on rugs and pillows.

Today, in our society, the chair no longer bears any reference to these codes, and this has emphasized its silence and discretion, its apparent triviality. However, some specimens of the order conceal a profusion of signs we rarely suspect exist.

It is the artist's mission to reveal the hidden beauty that things harbor and we have stopped noticing. To create new realities where the free and joyous voice of forms may express itself.

Irma Grizá allows us to glimpse the secret inner life of these objects that our blunted sensibility makes us believe are inanimate; she reminds us of their sculptural dimension (i.e. the material, volumetric, and also playful, free-spirited dimension of these pieces of furniture whose only function seems to be utilitarian).

Seduced by Barragán's art, which manages to convey the inmost clamor of places and things to certain artists who have a particularly sensitive sense of hearing, Irma has in turn made a body of work capable of causing inner vibrations of the same nature in us.

Her canvases give rise to a passionate dialogue, which we may only witness as spectators, among the represented chairs (sober, exquisite, endowed with a visual intensity granted to them by their presence on a flat surface and within the territory of figuration, where shapes are the only substance) and the others, the three-dimensional ones that inhabit our lodgings.

The whispers of this conversation-like those that can be heard when one approaches mirrors-allow us to sharpen our sensitive consciousness and distinguish the blurry borders that exist between the matter and soul of things as well as between our perceptions and the interweaving of dreams.

Luis Barragán was a man who spent his life examining enigmas of light and space, texture and color that in the end were perhaps nothing more than metaphors for another deeper inquiry where he attempted to find the keys to a greater mystery: the one that controls relations of contingency and transcendence. He built his work in order to inform us about an elusive, inaccessible presence (pure beauty, perfect love, the absolute), to foster epiphanies. His spaces were created to seduce light, shelter tranquility, encourage the coming of the Spirit's breath.

By rendering homage to this aesthetic project and the artist that gave life to it, Irma has recourse to devices which are similar to those the architect used: joyous light, intense color, sobriety, contrast; she constructs spaces to celebrate white or yellow, she creates atmospheres where red and blue depict the charm of plenitude. These canvases display compositions, which allude, suggest, and call for discretion; human presences that are never explicit but always nearby, thanks to the power of evocation that breathes life into them. In these works jubilation is colored by temperance, and absence is only one facet of hope.

Barragán managed to build spaces that could give rise to one of the loftiest states human beings can desire: serenity. Irma, in this feast of thanks to the artist who has illuminated so many lives, including her own, presents us with a gift of the same kind: a body of work wherein we can hear, at once, the vibrant speech of things and the subtle echo of emotions.