Natuka Honrubia

Natuka Honrubia (re)composing the body
Tania Pardo

“In the Caprice 43, The sleep of reason produces monsters, Goya presented himself sleeping, leaning on his writing desk, as an artist overwhelmed by oneiric beings that preyed on his mind, thus contrasting reason and irrationality, as if the traditional destroyers of the former were in themselves the unrestrained passions of the latter.

And this is what Natuka Honrubia reflects, though from a contemporary perspective. Her drawings allude to that night-time monstrosity, expressed in the ghosts that populate the universe of dreams. Beings that stretch and elongate, induced by the verticality of repose, who lean on the walls for support while they seem to float in a cosmic world, and who stretch out to reach the floor. A world of shadows, where it looks as if these bodies were almost sewn together, joined, in a reference to the recomposition of the body, invalidating the concept of the ideal body; here, the whole anatomy gives way to the fragmented body, particicularly in the sculptures, in which the dismembering of limbs conforms the Autofagia (Autophagia): a ball of intertwined fingers, cast in bronze. The elongated members generate a touching visual strangeness, and we cannot help but think of the inclination for dismembering of the expressionists, the Dadaists, and the surrealists, not to mention the psychoanalytic tradition, where the body that is desired is broken down into components.

As an artist, she does not allude to the ideal prototype of a woman, to the mannequin; it is no longer the soft and desirable body, but one made up of parts of another body... or maybe parts of the same body? In Abrebocas (Mouthopener), an arm, conceived as an iron prosthesis, culminates in a hand that substitutes a tongue for two fingers, and the arm is capped with a set of teeth, to which we would add, to cause further unsettlement , the shadow that this arm casts on the wall for “it is often supposed that unpleasantness is removed from woman, from that sweet and stainless lady men desire, but woman is very often immersed in a world of pain and secretion traditionally off limits for representation. This is the source of the ugliness, deformity and unpleasantness affecting feminist art and not for any masochistic enjoyment it might suppose but as a means of exorcism."¹

Iron and bronze generate such plasticity in the solid forms from which these anomalous unusable prostheses sprout. The rotundity of the volumes and the subtle humour present the gaunt nakedness of these body-objects, and they stretch through space cross­contaminating everythíng, penetrating the intimacy of suffering, or perhaps they may be parts of a mutilated body? But the artist goes further and corporealises everyday objects, like that thimble, the Articulate thimble (A doll for Lulu), made of two legs articulated like those of a doll, evoking a sense of humour that we can trace to the surrealists, just like some pieces by Juan Muñoz that emanate a similar feel of irony and visual strangeness. We can also see this when Natuka superimposes fake arms and legs onto a food can, that then becomes part of this bloodcurdling universe.

Legs that elongate, fingers that become stylized, excessively thin bodies, etc. Without getting to the point of hypertrophy, where the feminine often reveals itself in an almost monstrous dimension, Natuka Honrubia tries to retrieve the object-body rather than representing it, alluding to the figure of the doll in sorne of her drawings; not to the automaton that is manipulated, which art history has often associated with sadism and pomography because of its destructured body, but to the doll that reveals itself and stops being beautiful-according to traditional standards-in arder to avoid being manipulated or abused. An evocation of the relationship between the human body and the extent to which it is a doll. A monstrous doll, like an "other being'', different, surrounded by parts of the body that recompose the puzzle of this evocative personal universe. Pieces that inhabit this unstable reality.

The work of Natuka Honrubia presents such a contrast between object and feeling that we could refer to Kant, when he claimed that beautiful art shows its excellence precisely in that it describes things as being beautiful that would be ugly or unpleasant in nature.

Translated by Brendan Lambe