Like a mystical number, or a secret code, on the 10th of October, 2010, I found myself before Sekhmet, “The most powerful,” “The invincible,” the Egyptian goddess with the face of a lioness who symbolised strength, the one considered both the goddess of war and of healing.
Like a burst of glory, light entered her temple at Karnak in a zenithal way. The guide read to us the prayer used to invoke her, and suddenly, before me, her powerful magic emerged. Anyone who has been there knows I am not lying; the theatricality and power of suggestion that the Egyptians so skillfully created through their stage designs, lights, shadows, and carefully chosen masks will make that moment recognisable in their person.
Estefanía Martín Sáenz proposes, with Fieras, at the Gema Llamazares Gallery in Gijón, an individual (and collective) empowerment that is loaded with codes, stagecraft, theatricality, and, beneath it all, despite the great lie that could be interpreted from the characters of a work, absolute truth. Throughout the history of art, the figure of the woman, always muse, always submissive, always “adorned” with what man (male) wanted or presumed of her, has bestowed upon women a mask that has nothing to do with the true woman behind that representation. These have been centuries of misreading any scene, any role we assume in plastic representations that today, fortunately, we can reread and refocus.
Whenever I speak of Sekhmet, I inevitably end up linking her with the central (and feminine) figure of Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. Marianne, as she is called in France, is an icon of Romanticism and a true social and economic change in 19th-century Europe. The French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution… in short… revolution! A revolution that in these days we almost graphically translate into feminist demands. Women, with their breasts exposed, demanding a “new ethics.”
Estefanía turns to the opposite, to cover, to mask, to hide the faces of the women she represents in this series. Women, all of them, distinguished or recognised for some reason, not only for a physical trait but for their work, their profession, their mind, their deeds. The mask that Estefanía gives them, feminine, delicate (due to the materials she uses), turns out to be, in turn, terribly characteristic, terribly intimidating, terribly powerful. Characters that women represent, even as ourselves, in the different facets of life: mothers, editors, artists, critics, curators, designers, creators, daughters, granddaughters, partners, sisters… a thousand facets that make us change our skin every few moments but never make us lose our essence, that essence that Estefanía helps us concentrate into an elixir…
The procedure is as follows: the artist conducts a brief questionnaire, the same for all the women represented (a trait that identifies you, a word, a colour…); thus extracting all our potential, but beware, not with how others see us, but with how we identify ourselves, how we represent ourselves. Roles we probably feel comfortable with or those we have been forced to face in relation to the social constraints from which, today, the artist makes us shed. It might seem as though Estefanía is making us protected with the masks, when in reality, she has made us strip bare, dive in, face, understand, and come to terms with our most characteristic traits, confessing both our strengths and weaknesses.
Heroes, in the end, is what EMS represents with this series. Just like the superheroes of science fiction, we, women, are the heroines, the strong, the powerful, the present… and real ones, who, perhaps often invisible, covered, filtered, modest in our achievements, never saw ourselves as such: enigmatic, collective, pioneering, bearers of those codes that make us goddesses, unique… warriors and, at the same time, givers and receivers of the most powerful changes in our existence.
With Fieras, which we can see at the Asturian gallery from 22nd November until the end of the year, Estefanía Martín Sáenz does an exercise of visibility and empowerment that, as has been customary in her career, filtered through a refined and elegant language and aesthetic, becomes a thoughtful and poignant reflection for the one who, as Gibrán once reflected, will go mad when the man strips himself of all masks, these torn away by the gods, but it is in that conversion to madness that we truly find freedom.
