Natuka Honrubia

When the Dreams of reason Come to Life
José Luis Clemente

Arms whose slenderness stretches till they touch hell; wings rising quietly above the clouds, stairs that raise their softness to hold shoes in the void; horses tied into a stinging trot; impish sexes hooked onto a drip feed, wheels holding perforated facts and wheels driven by little nightmares all make up the startling imaginary landscape that Natuka Honrubia brings to life in her sculptures. These are sculptures that stretch out over the floor and hang from the walls to modulate the hidden silences of the space that names them. Natuka Honrubia’s sculptures not only suggest; they also narrate. They speak in a medium voice, sometimes shouting but always manifesting the need to express, though without revealing all. Their expression is rather one that attempts to lend shape to uncertainty; one that is drawn wide across an immense paper and is also compacted on the anvil, giving rise afterwards to grotesque beings and terrible objects.

In order to sculpt her imaginary landscape, Natuka Honrubia uses steel almost exclusively, making it elastic. She needs to extract from it the plasticity of the volumes and imperfections of the voids, rather than the solidity of compact forms or the gravity of masses. Natuka Honrubia defines reality by exploring its shadows, not so much as Brâncuși would have done, but as Julio González would have conceived it. Hammering the iron, arching it, breaking it, making it malleable, the artist also draws in space. That is where she engenders her deformed pieces, where she fertilizes innards and prolongs strange prosthetics. The exploratory itinerary that Natuka Honrubia follows around reality leads her to go beyond its limits. Like Hieronymus Bosch in his triptych of Delights, the artist populates reality with mind-bending residents, making an inhabitable fantasy in which everything is possible while resorting, again like Bosch, to irony in order to embody her contraptions and create the mechanisms that make the delirium work.

Natuka Honrubia composes her sculptures piece by piece, making them depend upon an arbitrary continuity. In principle, there is no compositional logic capable of defining the formation of her metallic anatomies, not even the ones sketched in graphite, though many of her constructive elements end up perfectly recognisable and their layout seems to observe compliance with a specific constructional purpose. Wings and muzzles, whips and wheels, arms and tails, hands and legs, trampolines and stairs gradually adapt their formal dissonances to embody all kinds of artefacts; grotesque and alarming. These dissonances also stand out when Natuka Honrubia peels away the metal skins, binding them to other materials such as cotton and plaster. The artist thus generates a series of ambivalences that show the bewilderment caused by reason when it is induced to dream. Natuka Honrubia, like Goya too, visualises the shadows of reality, giving them shelter. From her, nightmares and shocking monsters emerge, inhabiting her deformed hollows. As if generated by a terrible metamorphosis, Natuka Honrubia’s artefacts, like those of Juan Muñoz based on other assumptions, take form in deformity and give rise to anomalous narrations that are at times grisly, at times tender; at the same time jocular yet terrifying.

Translated by Gary Smith