Natuka Honrubia

La monstruosidad y todas sus puertas
Joaquín Artime

Countless narratives have told us that monsters[1] are scary. That is something we learn from a very young age through tales and their many lurking dangers. Darkness is the territory par excellence for such creatures. They are unknown creatures with alien(-ating), recognisable but dislocated bodies. They generally hide in blind spots: behind a door, in a drawer, or in the gap under one’s bed. They are spaces as close and near as they are uncomfortable and suspicious.[2] These beings inhabit the hiding place of possibilities. They foster terror, because there is nothing so scary as the unclassifiable thing that is alive.

 

In this sense, the problem is always others: those who are not like us, nor do they share our appearance or our customs. They are scary, packed with great potential. It is our ignorance that empowers their ability to scare, leading our imagination to uncharted quarters where they turn into brutal enemies. We have constantly been told that monsters are scary; I wish they had told us that it is our fear that creates the monsters. There are monsters on the outside, via a sequence of projections that fill out every void to offer up some meaning. And monsters inside. It is worth asking ourselves if the meaning we construct in that sequence of projections doesn’t turn us into ruthless judges annihilating all reason.

 

In Beau Is Afraid (2023), the American director Ari Aster shows us a man who, despite his advanced age, suffers from phobias and chronic anxiety. His desperation drags him down, like a tsunami, with the worst What ifs… one can conceive, heightening his existence into a horrible nightmare. The distortion in his way of seeing, despite anxiolytics, antidepressants and antipsychotics, makes him feel exposed to and controlled by perennial danger. Perhaps this is a warning to us of the disease of contemporary subjectivities, no longer able to recognise themselves in anything, affected by the overwhelming overstimulation of neoliberalism.

Natuka Honrubia's work draws on these merciless sufferings and symbolisms (Lagardera, 1995, p. 20) to create a body of work that speaks of both nightmares and dreams. Of fantasies and fears. Of delusions, restlessness and an abject notion that attempts to re-create and re-invent the implications held by the experience of living.

Living, that is, as an activity contemplated through the inner workings, from one’s gut. That is why in the beginning she was interested in the home and its frailties, like monoliths in continual transit, prepared to not stop anywhere so as not to find rest, despite resembling a coffin. By doing so, she speaks of mutability and the impossibility of permanence, as if constructions and objects are ungraspable, with everything

pointing towards future abandonment. Soon the toy and the doll appear, no longer as an object, but as a body dissected at a tender age. The skin is no longer skin, but a shroud. It is a prison of flesh that opens, stretches, twists and deforms. A spectral, hybrid body wavering between life and death.

 

Honrubia's figures are made of recognisable fragments: fingers, hands, breasts, nipples, eyes, anuses, mouths, teeth, lips, tongues, noses, ears and feet. They combine together disconcertingly, converting the expectable into a violation alluding to us, attacking us. Their limbs appear well-jointed or broken within a painful tangle. Their organs swell like balloons about to burst. Dried out muscles. Protuberances. Dislocated limbs. There is an overwhelming baroque carnality containing a tense, looming negotiation. Their forms appear surrounded by a string of fetishistic features. Often there are daggers that threaten, point, wound, penetrate and sink in. All of this is within a game intended to show the grotesque, the harrowing, the sinister,[1] running through delicate themes that lead us to a depiction of pain; a pain that should be kept hidden.

 

She tackles this depiction in two ways: through drawing and sculpture. Her training in sculpture has enabled her to get to know the techniques in depth, over which she shows remarkable mastery, in order to then toy with a pop arrangement. One way to understand her work is as a construction by parts, where the activity consists of mending and joining bits and pieces. To do so, she stockpiles a great deal of material. This leads her to the idea, and the idea leads her to the material. It is a looping search where she finds, mixes, moulds and accommodates in a complex combination, like a kitsch artifice. It is a collage in which what matters is not the execution, but that the pieces should fit together.

We could say that her practice is an exercise in which she is continually assembling and disassembling. This aspect can also be perceived in her large drawings, made with paper sheets of various sizes that she puts together like a puzzle. Without prior sketches, Honrubia allows herself to be carried away by the intuition of her attentive gaze in order to understand where each piece is asking to be directed. She habitually takes up a work from the past again to arrange it in keeping with her new concerns and obsessions; to transform and expand it into a new layout that more effectively sets out the purpose for which she created it. Over the years, she has fluctuated between the darkness of charcoal and the joy of colour. She has approached note-taking through doodling with a pen. She has introduced images from magazines, advertising posters and even medicine packages, drawing on and around them, integrating them. She has added words, like comic speech bubbles, to clarify or to confuse. That is where the offence, the insult and their contradiction arise. Sometimes the letters get twisted, as if in flames, between legibility and illegibility. Her name often emerges in the image, not as a signature, but as another way of getting involved, exposing herself, so as to assert her existence as a person, as a creator and as a woman.

Her universe is deeply feminine. Each artwork hints at different dimensions that have historically been linked to women: houses, dolls, furniture, clothing, accessories and kitchen utensils. By doing so, she speaks of gender inequalities, oppression, sexualisation, objectification and corsetting. From there, she continually returns to her childhood in order to understand the origins of the problem. The philosopher Georges Sebbag (2007, p. 83) says, "young people are at the mercy of adults who make a face for them." Knowing that education is not natural or spontaneous, but artificial and calculated,[1] childhood is the obstacle that adults are condemned to revisit so as to understand the shadows and terrors of the past.

 

In this sense, sexuality is a capital issue. If sexual awakening is habitually related to the loss of innocence, Honrubia does not hesitate to address—with disobedience—the uncertainty of this moral question in order to rebel against a castrating education. Her use of the erotic and the sensual generates a duality that fluctuates between prohibition and attraction. Enjoyment and pleasure become confused with apprehension and humility, embodying a voluptuous, overflowing work that is presented to us as an offering. Her figures have not been corrupted; they only externalise a complexity that seems harsh to us because it is foreign. They are monsters from not-so-distant worlds. It is possible that we dislike what they end up telling us, that they trigger rejection in us; but it is because we have not tried to understand them.

Even so, these monsters are not victims. They do not suffer due to their strange condition.[2] They are symbolic entities that present themselves to us without complexes, satisfied, open. Within all of this there resides a powerful sense of humour; an irony that constructs a different story each time. As with the doors the characters go through in Monsters Inc. (2001), each artwork takes you to a different place at any time. And the key to understanding them lies not in scrutinising the horror, but in discovering the tenderness capable of arousing a smile. After all, guts and gutsy share the same root.