AURORA CAÑERO

AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

Look closely at that small figure standing erect on its bronze pedestal, restively gazing out al some point in space, because al any time it may decide to set itself back in motion. Now it is at the centre of an infinite lake, and its allention has been captivated by one of the many marvels that exist in its universe.

Aurora Cañero's characters think, look, rest.

Each of her bronze sculptures, noble and substantial, harbours a tension between what has just happened -a past that is barely bin-ted al- and what is going to happen next-discovery, movement, metamorphosis. Each of her works tells of a decisive event, the instant when that person dwelling at the centre of the universe faces his moment of truth.

Alone with itself, floating in mid-air before our eves over a small piece of its world, it leaves behind the turmoil of worldly hustle and bustle to come up against mystery. Placid, austere, grand, helpless; wise, naive; it has now become a symbol.

These sculptures are devoid of drama and passion, they do not tell of joy and sadness, but there is always an intensity of emotion: the plenitude of oblivion, a communing with the truth about oneself, such depth of feeling boring into us from within these figures' enormous fragility. Aurora Cañero seeks a place for buman beings next to the heart of nature and portrays them there, where there is no room for emotion but for the sum total of all emotion. The artist knows that what human beings feel most of all is curiosity, that, like children, they discover and invent. Her repose,

promenade, they all appear here in their pure state, like the figures themselves, completely bared, and invent. Her creations are her pedestal, her one world, her confines, her name. Her island.

On the island at the centre of the world, no-one is without a name and an origin. Science, art, sports, freed. The self facing its actions; action in the purest sense. Is this the future of science and of life, or is it a tangible representation of our travels through today? It is neither: it is poetry, something eternal, subtly and indis-tinctly linked to the world, modelling souls as the wind turns mountains to dust. With all the time in the world.

Aurora Cañero's sculpture is based more and more on a formal perfection deeplyrooted in the classical canon of beauty that requires an increasingly intricateknowledge of anatomy, proportions, and composition. Viewing these latest works it is interesting to note that the characteristic elimination of formal aspects and austere semblance are the last step in a rapid process of exclusion of everything that is contrived, imported, merely ornamental, so typical of formative stages. This has not been hard for the sulptress: Aurora Cañero's work has never contained excessive formal rhetoric, no even in the earliest stages of her development, nor has its discourse ever been based on the unearthing of recipes never used before.

Strictly speaking, there has been no invention of a new vocabulary, no rush to make the ostensible achievements of other artists ber own.

This sculptress' creative power has been channelled into the nurturing of her own sensitivity and her own ability to extract

correspondences, metaphors, and symbols from this impenetrable world we all live in. She has wisely gambled on naturalism and has succeeded in withstanding the temptation to become involved in it using other peoples' discoveries for guidance. Her path unfolds within the bounds of these sight poems, unaffected and exciting. An analysis of the relationship between the figure and the pedestal that makes up its world is, from a purely formal standpoint, in itself a significant and sufficient contribution.

The soundness of her approach could have let Aurora Cañero head for the territory of large installations or stress the scenographic element in her compositions. Given her imagination, knowledge, and boldness of composition, her voluntary renunciation of the pompous and the spectacular bares many of the stratagems often resorted to in present-day art. Simplicity, the distinctive feature of these works and the key to their magnetism, represents the triumph of pure, direct, unappealable, familiar beauty over the misuse of the amazing. By paring the superfluous from her creations, the artist draws ever nearer to the secret of the beauty and mystery of which the sculptures of antiquity are possessed. Aurora Cañero teaches us that the power of their magic is certainly, like poetry, eternal.

At the end of the millennium, Aurora Cañero is, together with many other artists of our time, helping symbolic thinking, that warm refuge of poets and treasure bunters, to guide our steps in an uncertain process of becoming. Her sculptures doubtless gaze out at us from the future.