Carmen Calvo

(Valencia, 1950)

Reconstruction series

1985

mixed media, collage, gouache

38 x 52 cm

Inv. no. 5107

BBVA Collection Spain



Carmen Calvo’s practice is defined by the organicity of unique found, fragmented and modelled objects, as well as by a quasi-museumlike thoroughness in rendering her works. Her interest in Egyptian art and archaeology can be traced back to her years in Paris when she availed of the opportunity to frequent the Louvre and the Père Lachaise graveyard. Those experiences fed into an innate curiosity which led the artist to compile apparently mundane, albeit highly meaningful materials and to arrange her works in such a way that they seem to have been buried or interred.

With the title Reconstruction Series, this fan is one of the two objects intervened by Carmen Calvo which were presented at Otros abanicos (Sala de Exposiciones Banco Exterior, 1985), a group show curated by Natacha Seseña and produced by Fundación Banco Exterior, in which 29 artists were given absolute freedom to decorate fans, both large and small, folding and fixed. In 1988 the exhibition travelled to the Spanish Institute in New York and in 1990 to Palacete del Embarcadero in the port of Santander. In the catalogue, images of the pieces on show were accompanied with texts commissioned to Francisco Umbral, Camilo José Cela, Antonio Gala and Elisa de Rojas, among others.

This piece belongs to an experimental body of work bearing the same title, which, together with the Landscapes, Writings and Compilation series, comprises one of Calvo’s most significant lines of research. In this case, the white poster board fan is appended with a number of small geometric figures, also made in poster board. The result is a delicate piece, in which the cuttings have been made in an organised, rhythmic fashion, partially completing the figure and hinting at the reconstruction of a whole from discovered remnants. Carmen Calvo often uses the silhouettes of objects and compilations of fragments and disparate elements to explore ideas on memory and remains.

In the exhibition catalogue, this piece was accompanied by a text by Rosa Chacel examining the act of painting a fan and the materialisation of the invisible atmospheric phenomenon of the wind, arguing that decorating a fan could be equated with painting something as evanescent as the breeze.