Helena Toraño knows well where the secrets of the nordés lie. Not all of them, because this air that clears the skies of the territories of the Iberian West and wounds with icy ferocity is difficult to catalogue and even more difficult to capture. But his determination to retain this ambiguous, mestizo wind, in which northern gales and eastern currents are knotted together, is the basis of a creative work capable of constructing a story that traverses the diverse geographies of mystery and its sentimentalities.
Toraño has an advantage. Her origins and experiences in Llanis, in that eastern part of Asturias where the clouds are tied day in and day out to the peaks of the Cuera and Sueve mountain ranges, have made her familiar with a topography that is much more than a landscape, a territory inhabited by a state of mind, a place with a singular way of being, looking at and understanding the world. This strange space, full of simple things that hide many enigmas, is what the Asturian artist has been able to bring to her canvases.
The palm trees imported by the Indianos to the Cantabrian lands, shaken by the northeast, do not come from the catalogue of Helena Toraño’s dreams, they are part of her life and her gaze. Just like those seascapes where dolphins jump over immaculate waves or the skies with cotton wool clusters broken by a balloon that defies all verticality. But all of them, executed with precise and accurate brushstrokes, with flat tones and with the technique of superimposing and accumulating images, are some of the postcards that the painter from Lanzarote sends us from that region that she has been able to trace on the maps where reality mates with dreams.
Metamorphosed into a Cantabrian Patricia Highsmith or a Cantabrian Georges Simenon, Helena Toraño has managed to create, with the elements of her biographical territory, scenarios where figures in long trench coats, black glasses, cocked hats and knotted scarves hide their faces, spy on amorous infidelities or flee to the sides where the canvas has its borders. And it is these characters, with their clear lines and bright colours, who unleash the mystery, who stir the spectator’s restlessness to unravel the enigmas of our existence. There is also a touch of melancholy in his work, similar to that found in Helena o el mar del verano, those little more than 80 pages that Julián Ayesta from Gijón left us in the fifties of the last century to fossilise a world that was on the run.
And alongside the characters who keep the secret, the other motifs that are the hallmarks of Toraño’s work are perpetuated. The vinyls of Françoise Hardy or The Pastels, the naïve dolls of todoauneuro, the film posters of Jean-Luc Godard or Jacques Tati, the gardens of impossible plants, the cats, dogs, foxes and birds… all form part of the material that identifies this happy, melancholic and sinister region in which the artist from Llanes lives.
Toraño’s virtue is that she does not renounce traditions. And she does so in the plural, without prejudice. She is alien to the mysticism of those avant-garde movements that deny the effort and successes of the past. However, she has no qualms about recognising herself as much in the Renaissance balances as in the creative perturbations of the most sensible artistic currents that Romanticism gave birth to. It would be easy to place her among the followers of the Impressionists, of Henri Rousseau and his primitivism, of the Pop-Art of David Hockney, Peter Blake, Luis Gordillo and Eduardo Úrculo or, also, of the Madrid figurativists of the late seventies of the last century. Helena Toraño has learned from all of them, but she does not hide the fact that she has also been seduced by the work of Boticelli, Matisse, Hopper and Magritte, Balthus?
That nordic, ventriloquist wind that whispers so many different ways of understanding the world around us, has contributed with its luminous and glacial air to build the works that make up Top secret, Helena Toraño’s latest production for the Gema Llamazares Gallery. The painter from Llanes, who knows the mysteries of the air that blues the skies, cools the souls, crests the waters and beats the palm trees, continues to build with the materials of a lived and felt environment a work of dreamlike breath, with enough creative strength to move and shock.
