Ante cada pieza creada y serigrafiada por Guillermina Lynch, se percibe la poética de su ejecución y la arquitectura de un montaje meditado en la belleza, en el sentido en que Stendhal se refiere a ella cuando afirma “la belleza es la promesa de la felicidad”.
Siento ante su trabajo este certero impacto que me lleva a pensar que de otra forma, si no mediara esta orquestación técnico-poética en su manufactura, no podríamos sumergirnos en los ritmos de esas profundidades, donde el manejo de las luces y las sombras, tan excepcionales de sus textiles, lleva a la categoría de lo real-maravilloso y nos permite acceder a ese gozoso orden de la percepción. Sus trabajos operan en esa zona de la materialidad donde la sensualidad de los terciopelos será mutada a otros estados. Aquí se cumple, sin dudas, la metáfora del encantamiento.
Las imágenes de mundos acuáticos, flores, vegetación en superficies y profundidades por donde navegan ornamentos junto con simbólicos peces carpas, trasmutan visiblemente en una sonoridad nacarada, coral, táctil, suave, metálica, acariciable, próxima y lejana, entre un “aquí” y un “allá” de un viaje de la mirada y los sueños.
Guillermina Lynch concibe así la existencia de sus textiles. Creo que alcanza, a través de ellos, la concepción de Mallarmé: no pintar la cosa sino el efecto que ésta produce.
En los espacios de habitar, casa, cuerpo, muros, exteriores e interiores u objetos, quedará su signo envolvente para restablecer desde sus textiles el vínculo con el centro vital de la belleza.
Rosa Skific
Velvet Gardens
I see in my works the evidence of a trace, my trace.
A trace that is the result of searches, trials, and imaginaries that allowed me to find my own working methodology.
Within this process, there is an initial draft of the possible composition of elements, an attempt to begin uncovering certain dialogues between the materials. Until I lift the stencil and an unexpected texture emerges, forcing a new reorganization of this structure. Minute by minute, it is reformulated. In other words, at some point, my works are alive; they have their own life in their small ecosystem that breathes, mutates, and grows. Elements that need to adapt and coexist with one another. And the playful nature behind it, the element of surprise in noticing that where the fabric was smooth, an imposing texture has emerged. It is as if these plants, flowers, fish, and branches slowly began to stop depending on me, like nature in its natural, pure state. It is fun to think of the creation of my work as the creation of a garden. Reminiscences of the gardens I inhabited in my childhood, observing and learning about the process of plants. A process that becomes blurred, as vegetation has its own rhythm, goes out of control, manifests, “settles” without asking for permission. The base matrix is lost in the velvet, the flower becomes uncomfortable with excessive exposure to the sun. A material I use or a heavily covered plant that loses its tension when exposed to the elements.
But there are secrets there, which must remain hidden and characterize this methodology: the secret writing done layer by layer and hidden beneath the velvet's nap and the accumulation of textures.
I believe that the primary element for the orchestration of all these micro-universes is my hands and their direct and constant contact with the material. In my purely artisanal work, a ritual is created, a mystical experience, a mantra, a process open to becoming. I think there is something unique in this hand-material bond, where I first make the drawings on tracing paper, using Chinese ink, and sometimes the color of the velvet is achieved through an intervention with vegetable dyes. In this artisanal dimension, the pursuit of perfection is abandoned, and beauty manifests in the different traces of the process. A process that seems never-ending.
Just as in planting a garden, where the work is done bent over, bringing the body close to the earth, I work on top of the velvet, placing a large part of my body on it. And it is thus, almost blind, but in full contact with the fabric with which I create magical universes, velvet gardens.
Reappropriation of an Ancient Technique
I create my works using screen printing. This printing technique involves reproducing images on materials by transferring ink through a mesh stretched on a frame. The flow of ink is blocked in areas where no image will appear using a photosensitive emulsion, leaving free the area where the ink will pass.
This ancient technique originated in Eastern culture, in the Fiji Islands around 3000 B.C., where pierced banana leaves were used to distribute ink. It is believed that in ancient China, human hair, woven and lacquered, was used to hold the stencils. The material was later changed to silk, which is where the name originated: sericum (silk in Latin) and graphe (to write in Greek).
Many drawings made using screen printing have been found in the caves of the Pyrenees. The Egyptians also used it to decorate murals and the interiors of temples and pyramids.
Screen printing spread across Europe in the 18th century with the production of canvases for paintings and textile design prints.
In the 20th century, screen printing became exponentially popular with the development of new techniques and materials. Advertising posters, t-shirts, cards, and other materials were produced in the United States using this technique.
The connection between screen printing and traditional art began with the painter Guy McCoy, who started using screen printing for artistic purposes in 1932. Photography also marked another great leap in the popularity of screen printing due to its versatility in being printed on many materials with various chemicals.
In the fashion world, Michael Vasilantone began using, developing, and selling a screen printing machine to make multicolored garments in 1960.
Andy Warhol is one of the most emblematic figures in the history of screen printing as an artistic medium. The famous Marilyn Diptych from 1962 is a great example of this.
My connection to screen printing is marked by a reappropriation of the technique and a deep passion for its symbolic implications. Screen printing is defined as the potential reproduction of the same image ad infinitum, but I like to think that it’s never the same fish, never the same flower. Even though the same screen is used, it deforms or disappears in the accumulation of materials. The world of exploration it opens up is compelling to me, where the logic of trial and error disappears, as there is richness in every image produced. I began to experiment with velvet, creating new textures, tactile readings, and visual universes in the interaction between screen printing and this noble fabric with such conceptual density.
I embrace uncertainty in this process of work, marked by both the unique and the multiple image.
I create the drawings of the possible image, thinking about the multiple images that can emerge, but without certainty. Until I lift the screen, I don’t know which image has been imprinted on the fabric. In its traditional characterization, screen printing is certainty and security in repetition, but I think of it as a playful, random, and mysterious game, with the possibility of obtaining unexpected and unimaginable results. Within this vital process, the stencils change, break, and wear out. Other figures emerge, which I am interested in exploring until they are finally covered up and disappear.
That’s when I change the screen or abandon that image. The amount of material and the processes the inks undergo in the water result in diverse outcomes. There is a multiplicity of unique images.
There are four elements I have worked with over these years: the flower, the fish, the water lily leaf, and the branches. The combination of these beings and screen printing allowed me to explore obsessively just how far each of them would continue to give me images.
In this search for the expansion of the image, what am I looking for? I like to think of it as a question regarding the limit of transformation. From a minimal structure, one can freely transform toward infinity.
So, how far can we transform without losing ourselves?
How far can expansion go without losing identity?
June, 2023.
¿Qué le pasa a los cuerpos cuando se sumergen en el agua? Me acuerdo de esa película de los 80de Ken Russell, Altered States, traducida como “Un viaje alucinante al fondo dela mente”. El protagonista, un profesor de psicología, empieza a experimentar sobre la privación sensorial con tanques de flotación; piensa que nuestros otros estados de consciencia son tan reales como el estado de vigilia. Cuando entra en contacto con el líquido, su cuerpo y su mente se rompen y se transforman en un estado de materia primitiva, un estado del que no se puede volver.
En los terciopelos de Guillermina Lynch los colores se funden en el negro como la piel se expande y se pierde al hundirse en el agua; hay que cerrar los ojos y recorrer con los dedos la superficie suave de sus obras, sentir que los límites se borran, las texturas se derriten y las manchas se empastan. Guillermina es una princesa que se escapa de su cuarto y atraviesa bosques de hojas plateadas y doradas para ir a bailar a una fiesta, para usar su cuerpo y moverlo y que sus órganos y sus pensamientos nunca queden en el mismo lugar, que se deformen de placer. Su obra es ese bosque con brillitos de fantasía, con plantas de guata dorada, lagunas de charol y flores de loto, arboles de hostias que parecen de cotillón, masas amorfas de film plástico como los restos de esa materia primordial, de ese mundo que existe si caminamos descalzos y nadamos de noche.
Catalina Perez Andrade, 2018
Velvet: The Animal That Cannot Be Captured
In this textile, usually associated with nobility and wealth, I find alternative meanings. Without losing its ineffable beauty, the stillness of virgin velvet transforms into a swamp. An expanse of water that, at times, becomes populated with creatures dancing across the entire fabric, with varying degrees of density throughout the watery textile.
Working with velvet is like working with a living material, where I adapt to it. The lights, shadows, and colors shift from night to morning, and then velvet becomes elusive, like an animal that resists being tamed. We work together, the textile and I, where I do not impose but instead create dialogues altered by the caresses of light or the shadows that settle on the fabric.
There is something both challenging and beautiful when, through my works, I strive to achieve a color that functions throughout all hours of the day, one that embraces the minimal static nature of the fabric in the most beautiful and harmonious way possible.
A thousand works breathe within a piece of velvet.
Empezó a llover bronce
sobre el agua brillante
había una luz de atardecer permanente
que iluminaba de contraluz las flores carnosas y doradas
enredaderas esmeralda se enredaban en troncos plateados
bichitos de diamante salpicaban el agua de la superficie del estanque
donde saltaban pescados majestuosos con aletas largas como pelos rubios
Chapoteando entre los camalotes
los cerezos soltaban sus pétalos
sobre los enormes irupés
que familias de sapitos rosas usaban de islas
empezó a pasar el tiempo
y pasaron cosas
los camalotes dejaron de reproducirse
la nieve se cristalizó
Los corales empezaron a palidecer
crecieron hongos
se gastaron las piedras por el roce del agua
ocurrieron erupciones subacuáticas de azufre
crecieron bacterias alimentadas por los deshechos de los pescados
que no soportaron la temperatura
las anémonas venenosas hicieron crecer algas
que se fermentaban y se pudrían en días
siguió pasando el tiempo
y pasaron más cosas
el estanque se fue secando
quedaron capas y capas geológicas
de restos y rastros fósiles animales y vegetales
huesos de corales
sal seca
barro petrificado
ramas quemadas
sedimentos endurecidos
el fondo oscuro quedó a la vista
formando un paisaje muy peculiar.
Santiago Ortí
The quest for new morphologies
Guillermina Lynch creates pieces that detach from reality to enable fantasies. Enveloped in her aura, they question the ontology of certain elements: What is serigraphy? What is embroidery? What is permitted with velvet? What place can a flower occupy?
In this fusion of expanding boundaries, her technique emerges: screen-printed embroidery on velvet. These methods and materials are used to represent the artist’s great obsession: the infinite varieties of orchids. The body is protected by these mantles, whose morphology, combined with the flowers that adorn and strengthen it, evokes the robes worn by guides of various metaphysical healing rituals. Velvet merges with the body, enhancing it with its sensuality and ostentatious intelligibility. The symbolic weight embraces its wearer, empowered by the orchids that surround the body like a utopian vine. These orchids, displayed in limitless sizes, colors, and textures, seek an approach to the divine through the abundance of the baroque, the desire to overflow, to burden the fabric until it bursts. These fierce flowers recall the ability to survive: to persist, adapt, mutate, think. The orchid as a magical element of transformation, combined with a disturbingly beautiful morphology that alters the body. A body that allows itself to disguise and freedom of imagination, feeling for a while like a noble, a shaman, a priest, a queen, or simply whatever its curious desire demands, dreaming of other identities. The costumes she creates today evoke the idea of body-territory, proposing a different link between the skin and nature, a new coexistence. The body, naked, is enhanced by coming into contact with orchids-in-velvet/velvet-orchids, producing an aura governed by synergy, vitality, movement, surprise.
In Guillermina Lynch’s work, as the research and representation of these flowers grow and evolve, so does the morphology of her pieces. First was the coat, then the figure begins to liberate and the kimono appears, culminating today in a cocoon.
[…]
De chica, Guillermina Lynch encontraba esa cualidad [la belleza] en el contraste entre el agua oscura de los estanques, el brillo dorado de los peces y la carne blanca de las flores que flotaban en él. A ese recuerdo primordial lo tradujo en dibujos que, con el tiempo, empezó a estampar sobre terciopelo. La particularidad de este textil de trama peluda cuya tonalidad varía según la luz con la que se lo mire la cautivó. Y en un intento por develar la capa más profunda de esa superficie sensual y vistosa, Guillermina estampa, quema y corroe la tela, dejando expuesta su fragilidad. Con el tiempo y el uso, los shablones –herramientas fundamentales de la serigrafía artesanal– se van agrietando y el color, entonces, traspasa los límites del dibujo. La flora y la fauna acuática muta, luego se fosiliza y termina convirtiendo a los tapices de Guillermina en un paisaje táctil de capas geológicas y sedimentos salinizados.
Elena Tavelli
Letting Go of the art Works…
What happens to the artist before their creations depart for their new destination?
I think that sometimes it is easier to just let them go, even though they could be worked on infinitely. It’s about recognizing an endpoint to open them up to other perspectives.
Other times, when a stronger bond is perhaps formed, I like to imagine my own coexistence with that work, outside the studio, hanging in my home, thinking about where I would place it if it were mine.
I play with hanging it in various corners of my house. It’s interesting to observe how the velvet, a characteristic medium of my work, interacts and changes with the light at different times of the day, generating different variations of the piece. Depending on where I place it, I can notice how the work transforms in a space with lots of light, with a different background.
Other times, in a certain corner, a more slanted light sneaks in, perhaps unsuitable for appreciating it in its entirety. In other words, the colors and textures of the works are altered by different lighting and various spaces.
There is something comforting and beautiful in seeing it as you pass by, feeling that a dialogue is established, if only for a moment, with something intimate that detaches from me to find its own path…
March 2024.
