Natuka Honrubia

Fragility in Human Arquitecture
Juan Lagardera

Natuka Honrubia is 24 years old. She has never exhibited as a solo artist; she has not seen the colossal display dedicated to Fausto Melotti by IVAM and of course she does not belong to the generation of artists schooled in the Fine Arts faculty who opine ceaselessly about her work and her influences.

To date, Natuka Honrubia has survived the artistic disregard by winning some awards. My attention was drawn precisely by her piece chosen by Bancaixa, and some months later I visited her studio. Natuka scarcely communicates verbally: “I don’t know how to write and although I very much like drawing I’m unable to sketch my work,” she told me. “That’s why I need to make sculptures.”

So she could hardly explain to me anything about her work in historiographic or deconstructivist terms. On the other hand, I encountered a young artist of extreme sensitivity. Fragile and self-effacing, she defends herself from her sentimental vulnerability by producing three-dimensional works.

It is not very common these days, but Natuka didn’t talk to me about the plastic connotations of each of her pieces, but rather revealed the emotive reasons that had driven her to them: the fear of death, the loss of a loved one, lack of communication, childhood as sadness, the heartrending learning process...

This tragic vein has driven Natuka towards a symbolic, explanatory nature, which for these and other reasons (which are indeed eminently plastic) place her in the orbit of sculptors who work by recomposing the possibilities inaugurated by artists like Alberto Giacometti and Germanine Richier.

Natuka shares that dramatic vision with the solitary Italian, which is enhanced in the mannerist vocation of stylising shapes until they are deformed, but in a distant, cold way by this young lady. 

There is a piece by Giacometti (Woman on cart) specifically reminiscent of the solutions provided by the pieces we are presenting here. The same occurs with Water, by Richier, whose expressive feet evoke the shape of those by Natuka.

That coldness we mentioned is more evident in other works by Natuka Honrubia that remain for the time being in her studio. But the coldness is only in appearance, taken from her veneration of Susana Solano, which on the other hand hides a turbulent world of suffering and ruthless symbols (coffins loaded with daily objects, carts carrying monolyths with images recorded from sad memory...).

But it is precisely when she abandons that register in favour of solutions that are not so finished but more irregular (which also make her comparable to Rebecca Horn), and above all more delicate, when Natuka Honrubia brings down all of our defences and travels around our emotions.

That is where the aforementioned Melloti’s strengths resound, from which Natuka unwittingly again takes up the primal, stylised treatment of metal to compose surrealised shapes that evoke sensations packed with great emotion.

There are two pieces presented in Alfafar that are full of mystery, at once totemic yet weak, where human physicality is clear as in the feet and evoked through a minimalist mattress, melting into a completely invisible whole with humanised architectures such as uteruses constructed with a moving fragility, halted or simulating movement or else making it impossible like in those wheels, one of whose axles is moving in the opposite direction.

It is a world of her own, mined with suggestions and with an extreme sensibility, and which explores old paths of modern sculpture in a fertile labour of rewriting which in some way is firmly marked by the art of the 80s and 90s as opposed to the novelty fair that an anguished attempt has been made to consolidate in contemporary plastic art.