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| Mezquita de Cordoba I, 2014, beeswax and oil on linen |
Helen Martin
A disquieting beauty
An exhibition of new paintings
Friday 25 - Sunday 27
April, 2014
11am to 5pm daily
St George’s Old
School Hall
Cr Hobson and
Learmonth Sts, Queenscliff,
Victoria
I start
these paintings of Spain with smears of waxy Alizarin on the raw linen surface
– the warm blood of creatures, the blood of sacrifice. Then comes a layer of waxy ochre – the sand
of forgetting to cover the spilt blood.
It can never quite obliterate the red stain, either in reality or in
memory. I discover the two create this
beautiful hue - a warm orange that glows and belies the pain that is so close.
And so I
begin painting my impressions of a summer travelling through southern
Spain. What binds together these
fragments of place are their underlying stories – some factual, some myth, all
imbued with themes of timelessness, sacrifice and forgetting. They have taken
me on an intriguing exploration of what constitutes sacred space; of the power
of desire; and its capacity to engender violence and destruction along with
beauty and grace. As Spain emerged from the bloody legacy of the civil war and Franco
years, it embraced an uneasy pact of forgetting as a way to move forward. There
was much to forget, but some memories are hard to erase.
Andalusia,
the fabled Al Andalus of Islamic rule,
where the people of the Book, Muslim, Jew and Christian, lived together with
religious tolerance for seven centuries, until it disintegrated with the Reconquista – the desire for Spain to be
ruled under one faith. Or is this claim of
tolerance itself a form of forgetting: a covering over of the messy bits that
challenge or question its veracity.
Plaza de Torres de Sevilla – her graceful archways enclose an
arena of intimate scale, breathtaking simplicity and striking colour,
especially in late summer. Brassy strands
of the Paso doble are but faint
echoes, along with the emotion rich cries of olé from the aficionados of the ritual, but the blood from slain
bulls and maimed toreros sinks deep into the sand. Be it dance, drama or cruel sport, the Corrida encompasses all these forms as
it plays out the complex cultural and sexual mores of Andalusian life.
Sinagoga de Santa Maria la Blanca,
Toledo, the oldest synagogue
still standing in Europe, was designed by an Islamic architect for the Jewish
people of Toledo living under Christian rule.
Now recognised as a symbol of great religious tolerance and co-existence.
Its conversion to a catholic church in the 12th century came after a
mob, incited by a zealous Dominican friar of the Inquisition, forced its Jewish
community to convert. Disputed stories of
a massacre still haunt its serene white-arched interior. The mauve shadows hint at a bruising past.
Mezquita de Cordoba – originally a roman temple then a
Christian church, the mosque was the third largest in the world. Built by
Muslim Caliphs over a 200 year period, its vast stands of soaring, red and
ochre horseshoe arches, its ornate Mahrib
and fragrant orange tree filled courtyard, remain today. In 1236, with
Ferdinand III’s victory in the Reconquista,
it was reconsecrated as a catholic church and is now the seat of the Bishop of
Cordoba. The renaissance cathedral nave,
inserted in the heart of the mosque under Carlo V, ruptures rather than integrates
the sacred space. It makes its mark, but is acknowledged as a travesty.
Mircea
Eliade writes in The Sacred and the
Profane (1957) that a sacred space is one set aside for the purpose of
ritual. When crossing the threshold of such places we leave our own time behind
and enter into the timelessness of hallowed ritual. In Spain, the plazas de torres, sinagogas,
mezquitas and churches all have this
quality of timelessness. They are multi
layered sites of sacred rites and sacrifice - Andalusian, Jewish, Muslim, and
Christian. Their architecture is integral to their rituals and sacredness, and it
encloses centuries of human experience, memory, emotion and spilt blood. It holds the stories, the good and the bad,
and for those who cross these thresholds with hearts that see and hear, the
stories live on.
April 2014
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| Plaza de Torres de Sevilla, 2014, beeswax and oil on linen |
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Real Alcazar de Sevilla, 2014, beeswax and oil on linen
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| Passages II, 2014, beeswax and oil on linen |
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Juderia Cordoba, 2014, beeswax and oil on linen
Passages III, 2014, Beeswax and oil on linen |
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| Sinagoga de Santa Maria Blanca, 2014, beeswax and oil on linen |
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| Passages I, 2014, beeswax and oil on linen |
