Natuka Honrubia

Recreational-organic transformations by Natuka Honrubia
Mª Teresa Beguiristaín

Natuka Honrubia is a young Valencian sculptor and drawing artist currently living in England, where she has established herself as a sculptor and teacher. 

Working tirelessly, she is young but her first exhibition was back in 1991, so she has a long track record behind her that has varied from pieces drawing heavily on psychology and dreams with a surrealist influence and a tendency towards the sinister, up to the pieces being showcased here. Although they are still coherent with her previous works, they have shifted towards organic-recreational forms that instil the same if not greater unease in the viewer as her early works.

All of her pieces, whether they be sculptures or her drawings in charcoal, possess the same nightmarish feel that contrasts starkly with her own almost childishly sweet character. She is like a tornado surrounded by a halo: pure contradiction in both formality and visuality.

Little known on the Valencia scene, where she has hardly exhibited her work, she has a strength and seldom-seen quality in her execution. Together with that character of hers, I have no doubt that she will infuse onlookers with a state of pleasant surprise that many theorists call aesthetic attitude and which always leaves the viewer wanting to know more about the creator of these works. 

The main theme running through her career is the body and its dream-like transformations; its nightmares. It is a reflection on the importance of the body in a society obsessed with beauty and the ideal, yet which is plagued with deformations and “uglinesses” that disturb the viewer, who can easily assimilate them as their own nightmares. Since her outset, with a predominance of basically black and white, she has gone on to create pieces packed with colour constructed with materials with a childish appearance in which bubble-gum pink predominates along with feminist purple and the pure white of wedding cakes. Her current pieces are mixed with little lost toys, with a mixture of reproductions of the parts of the body with which she seems to be obsessed: fingers, breasts and tongues; a mixture of feminism and childishness using significant sensorial extremities. Children learn by sucking and touching before they develop their capacity for reasoning as well as their breasts, those social fetishes that make the Western woman an object of masculine desire, so that when they develop they make her aware of her quality and attributes as a woman in the eyes of a man. And I am not referring to the past but to these current times that lead adolescents, as a reward for getting good school grades, to ask for plastic surgery to transform their bust in keeping with the dominant fashion. Large or small, rounded or pointed, close together or separated, depending on the fashion. 

In these works, all of the clichés about traditional femininity can be found. A woman’s childlike character, emphasised not only by the use of toys but by the playful nature of the colourful pieces; her reclusion in a golden cage in her home, reduced above all to the kitchen where cakes are baked, where fingers become culinary instruments, those fingers used for kneading; and those breasts like sponge cakes or brioches, breasts that offer themselves like golden gifts in a beautiful cage of blue suede with a purple ribbon; her yearning (necessary according to masculine dogma) for marriage symbolised by that wedding cake on a light tea table, and everything garnished with ribbons with that kind of knot that only women know how to do to tie up our apron. 

The images she produces are a blend of little Disney animals, Barbie dolls, powerful warriors with medieval weapons created in more modern times, and the sweets stall: all of the modern, infantilised society’s imaginary world. This is what makes me think that her nightmares, her dream-like character and her nature of feminist protest have remained intact since her beginnings. It is also what makes me think of the viewer smiling before the objects, since the ironic power they possess is easily perceptible and will not escape the viewer’s perception, however distant they feel themselves to be from contemporary art. And irony is a double-edged sword, since behind the objects’ innocent appearance there resides a crude criticism of a society that barely stops to think about itself. We leave that work to philosophers and artists. However, at the same time, the onlooker that has faced these will remain with the odd mental remnants that make them return mentally to the perceived image because, in the end, they feel that they have not managed to perceive it in its entirety. And that is true, because good art never exhausts perception.

Translated by Gary Smith