ELENA GALARZA

What do we remember from our childhood? How do we build the memories of our childhood? What is real and what is imagined in those memories? Are we evoking concrete experiences or just the sensations and emotions associated with these experiences?  This is one possible starting point to explore the work of Elena Galarza (La Laguna, 1966), an artist who picks at the seams of memory to return to the dreams, games and stories of childhood.

In a clear exercise of self-referentiality, with patience and depth, slowly and without haste, Galarza deploys in her drawings and paintings a personal imagery that over the years has become increasingly complex. Her inspiration comes from within, from an intricate inner world from which springs a prolific imaginary that allows her to render the invisible visible.

The apparent playful aspect of her works encourages the viewer to develop interpretations, to seek order and narration where there is neither order nor narration, nor hierarchies. Her compositions are enigmatic, strange, with a strong symbolic charge, without narrative structure, bringing together disparate elements, objects and figures that coexist and share their simultaneity.

In her drawings and paintings, time stands still, frozen, which the artist turns into an infinite past on which fragments of childhood are folded over. Through her work with memory, she restores images in which she combines experiences lived with those remembered, but also imagination and evocation as ways of knowing herself and others. And it is the footprints of childhood that, step by step, lead Elena Galarza to a primitive place where she can seek the origin of the creative impulse or perhaps the germ from which dreams and memories are made.

Yolanda Peralta