Natuka Honrubia

That everyday object that politely greets you. Natuka Honrubia thanks you
Rosalía Torrent

Tiger opens its first shop in Valencia and bids farewell to the Ann Summers sex shop”. With this headline, the digital information newspaper Valencia Plaza announced the opening in that city of what the newspaper itself called a “designer bazaar”. At the same time, it referred to the British franchise Ann Summers which, working in the sale of sex products, disappeared from the Ruzafa district’s scenery to give way to Tiger in precisely the same spot.

When I met Natuka Honrubia, one of the first things she mentioned was precisely that bazaar, which was a source of little objects that had fed her imagination (whose roots lay among pop and kitsch while its branches led into a paradoxically tender yet sinister grotesqueness), which was later to transform them into artistic objects. Moreover, these objects distil a sensuality that is as frank as it is disturbing. I wonder if the coincidence that has turned the shop with erotic wares into another with everyday products with designer labels on their backs, did not leave a ghost in the back room that flits among the artist’s work. Because both the excess that characterises the bazaar and the hallmark of sexuality are reinvented in works that nevertheless only seek in their own way to give thanks for the visits and interest of those who come to gaze upon them.

But that possible ghost has not appeared now. It is a hybrid of dispersion, inebriated with colour, inhabiting her work almost since it began, since in the “conceptual” school (in her own words) where she studied, characters like Koons were rejected for their decorativist excesses. Natuka, nevertheless, approved of his redeeming irony, his existential impudence, the abundance of his imagery. As for her, a person with a sober profile as serene as her words, she has nevertheless created some works that are prodigal in their morbidity and which only in her beginnings restrained their colour to the point of becoming painful. But only the colour. The number, however, portended a future exploding with profusion.

Let us go, then, to those places the artist inhabits today, to those sculptures like the one we are going to see in the exhibition we are called to. The one that will finally occupy the space in Calle de la Nave street can only be described without knowing the final result, since only when this catalogue goes to print will the work be finished. I only had the chance to see its first steps. However, related to her recent poetics, it is to be a corollary of her research into everyday life and an exploration of her own body which, fragmented, she has offered in recent times via copies from moulds. Indeed, in that mixture of daily things, sugar-coated with potent colours, there appear lips, breasts, fingers and an anus, which are her own lips, her breasts, her fingers, her anus. The artist’s body is offered up with modesty but fearlessly to the onlookers who, with more than a little astonishment, witness the chopped up entity presented to them.

Specifically, and if the work plays out in keeping with the creator’s initial idea, in this exhibition we will be contemplating a sculpture structured around an element as simple as it is evocative: a broom; specifically, a children’s broom, purchased in Tiger. Probably, at our feet a small mound of excrements will be reshaped, which will possibly prove to be pretty in their conception and plastic development, because everything when it comes to Natuka can be touched by the hand of beauty. However, in the end their destiny is to be swept away (here the artist could not avoid, on commenting it, creating a metaphor of the corruption that we know so much about in our country). On the upper part of the broom there will be different casts of her body that in the shape of coralline excrements will bloom before our eyes, tied together at the bottom by a ribbon evoking a gift. The inclination given to the broom handle will reinforce this sense of offering. This is because it is the creator’s specific wish for this piece to become an act of thanksgiving. In recent times, she says, she has felt the need to be grateful for many things, to hug, to kiss. And she wishes to do so with each and every part of her body accommodated like a bouquet of flowers atop a humble broom handle.

We do not know if on the wall where her piece will be placed there will be a drawing of hers accompanying it. Maybe she will return to London (where she wants to go back to where she stayed for fifteen years) to bring from there some of her agile drawings. In any case, an object that starts out as simple, industrial and anonymous is going to remain so no longer, becoming brimming with meaning.

Translated by Gary Smith