FORMAS ENCONTRADAS | 2021 | 2022
Sandra Baía is an artist who moves fluidly between the illusionist space of painting and the physical presence of sculpture, between the measured and concentrated of the small scale and the expanded and limitless of the monumental scale. Her work is situated at the intersection between painting, sculpture, installation and architecture, integrating and depending on the site, while overflowing to express its plastic possibilities.
Processually, one of his first steps is to think of the context as content, since her interventions frame and condition the exhibition space. Later come the formal nuances, the definitions, which, in any case, allow us to talk about composition, space, rhythm, colour... because everything in her works take us back to the pictorial or sculptural tradition, except for the definitive overcoming of the concept of the frame or pedestal.
Sandra Baía is an artist devoted to her task: to find the tension that remains hidden in the object. That is why she insists on motifs, seeking the different intensities of shapes, of their colours and, in short, of their memory. In this way, she goes beyond the reality of artistic disciplines because what really interests her is to work their intersections through plastic actions. This performative condition is already intensely born in her studio, where the artist strikes or softens the material she finds. Each work is an event, because it is triggered to dissimulate its construction by deconstructing and activating itself again when it reappears as a plastic enigma.
In the exhibition Formas Encontradas she succeeds in sensitising the viewer to architecture. The artist works with the resonance of space and objects, inciting the viewer to a dialogue between what they see and how they understand what they are seeing. This can be seen in the sculptural volume that emerges as we approach the Museum; its architecture of volumes and fissures, perfectly integrated into the natural environment, is dominated by a cube of perforated fabric which, as we approach, we discover uses fishing nets as material. The memory of the sea and the material rescued from the bottom of the sea reminds us of the primordial condition of her work and its sustainable condition, capable of giving objects a new life.
Sandra Baía activates resonances, creating landscapes within landscapes. Because in her work there is always something of illusion and something of reality, something of mental construction and something of physical inheritance of the materials, which the artist manages to "abstract" in order to separate them from reality. This produces a dissolution of the outline, something that is even more visible when she dares to blur the columns that dominate the interior architectural space of the Museum, paradoxically multiplying their forms. As spectators we move in an undefined space, with signs that lead us to experience displacements and energies that show us more the "in between" than the why of things. Sandra Baía is an artist of found forms that always gives an opportunity to the material. She does it through economy of means and processes. This is how she solves the complex, which ends up working by dominating the scale, the temperature and the situation, to destabilize the spectator's memory.
David Barro