Natuka Honrubia

Natuka in the Garden of delights
Pablo Ruíz

Natuka Honrubia, a “100% Valencian” artist, is still presented as a young sculptor and local drawing artist. Almost fifteen years have gone by since her first individual exhibition in Valencia to her last. Over those fifteen years, she has been established in London. Perhaps that is why, when she visits us, we see her as a stranger; we forget her past and we introduce her again as a young Valencian artist. However, her work is somewhat more than a future promise. Since she began, the nature of her work has clearly been linked to objects on the surface while evoking dreams and surrealism in her themes, coupled with an approach making social statement in keeping with her feminist background.   

In her works, the object is re-contextualised through the body, appropriating its humanity or monstrousness. The body, like a reflection in a mirror shattered into a thousand pieces, raging, replicates itself like a kaleidoscope, becoming an object. Using moulds created from her own body, Natuka turns a depersonalised woman into an object of desire, making her mutate into an object of repulsion, partaking in the ugliness that feminist art uses to show the banality of the female role and the instrumentalisation of eroticism and carnalism by a society obsessed with the ideal of beauty.

“Not exactly. I have never, as an artist, approached my work as a demand for any feminine role. I’m a woman and an artist. I think about it often. Maybe not perceiving my work as a protest is pure selfishness.”

There is, however, a before and after. Whereas her early sculptures (with a sinister range of colour) could be compared to the instruments from Cronnenberg’s disturbing Dead Ringers, her more recent works with their explosive range of colours are more typical of cute cartoons than bitter hallucinations, looking like they have come straight out of a Disney movie. Specifically, her fake tarts and sweets could have been cooked up by the fairy Fauna in Sleeping Beauty or keep their balance on the Mad Hatter’s head in Alice in Wonderland. It all responds to the need to turn what may have looked ugly or unpleasant in her early works into something pretty now. It also involves coating all the pieces with an immaculate whiteness. 

“Pleasure and pain are very relative. The work is becoming pretty, but if you look up close, you discover that it can’t be. Maybe it is. We each view it through our life. There’s laughter, pain and irony.”

Nevertheless, although works like Little Rabbit Loves To Play and I’d Really Like To Live Inside Of You, Baby may lead one to think otherwise, neither childhood nor fairy tales are a source of inspiration.

“I’ve never been aware of telling stories about my childhood.” My work has always been about ‘now’, even if that ‘now’ comes from a ‘before’. Even so, as for those who upon seeing it think of childhood...Only once have children’s tales been a source of inspiration. Thinking about children’s tales in general, not one in particular, was crucial for me to enter the Chapel of San Miguel near Sagunto without feeling cowed.”

Natuka turns her body into forbidden fruit and in an act of generosity she offers us her breasts and her nipples, her hands and fingers, her mouth and her lips so we can stroke them and nibble them. 

“The years go by and I feel that I want my work to be a gift. Now, much more so than in my early years as an artist, I can distance myself from my works (however much the stories are mine while I create them) and hand them over to whoever looks upon them. I don’t want to be the one to unwrap this gift.”

And she does so without inhibitions, to free the repressed temptations in her mind, since however white and immaculate the sweets are and however much they “don’t leave a trace”, they are not such “innocent pleasures”. Natuka’s desserts are still susceptible to interpretation from a Freudian perspective. Likewise, the narrative of a non-existent children’s tale (as a point of reference for her works) could be analysed from Bruno Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic perspective. Through her works, Natuka says things she would not dare to say any other way. 

“Often there is no reason for all of the elements that appear in my work; I’m not seeking a literal interpretation. It’s true that I make hints and those who know me personally interpret my work very differently from those who don’t know me...My work serves to tell and at the same time it protects me. I know that my work was and is very reserved. However much it seems to “show”, I don’t forget about what they’ll say. Some days I’d like to be brave enough to tell about things, if only for myself, without fear of somebody being incapable of looking at my work for it being “horrid”...I do tell everybody, but not everybody can read or wants to read the same tale.” 

Wanting to know more about what Natuka says in her works may seem to be an intrusion. On the other hand, we can write the tale that never inspired her work but which enables a reading to be made of its evolution. That tale is a lot like another that also appeared on the shores of the Thames. Originally entitled Alice’s Adventures Underground, the work by Lewis Carroll allows us to witness Natuka’s particular descent into Hell: Natuka’s Adventures begin like Alice’s, contemplating an incomprehensible world, escaping from it, running after a strange white rabbit and diving into a warren until she falls dizzyingly down a dark well... The warren is in reality a scatological orifice infested with fingers that stroke her in a hazardous fall, all the time surrounded by wound-inflicting objects... At the end of this intestine of sorts, a gloomy hallway with a welcoming atmosphere awaits her, populated with painful echoes of death, loneliness and suffering, inhabited by a chorus of closed doors. Only the smallest one, the size of a mouse hole, provides her with an escape route... In order to open it she will have to bring about her own metamorphosis, deforming her body in all directions, stylising herself on extremely thin bodily shapes and making herself as small as a girl... And even mutating into a doll ready to turn into a giant again, to serve as a disguise or armour. 

Perhaps that is how it happened. Natuka managed to open the tiny door and was able to see before her the most wonderful garden imaginable: The Garden of Delights, the false paradise of forbidden fruit and luscious desserts. Perhaps, just perhaps, it has all been a coincidence and now a completely different tale begins: the one which has yet to be written and which only Natuka can write. Perhaps that tale, Natuka in the Garden of Delights, begins right now and the artist is beginning a new adventure today.

Translated by Gary Smith