Hefesto

Hefesto is the new exhibition proposal by Vicky Uslé (Santander, 1981) for House of Chappaz. I say proposal rather than work because this is how the artist herself describes it when I ask her about the project: she does not work, she moves through a self-reflective process via her artistic practice which, driven by desire, is currently in a moment of change and transformation.

Vicky Uslé departs from her usual register and language—painting on paper and canvas and photography—to experiment with glass as a plastic and expressive material. Although she perceives it as something ancestral, something she carried within in a whispering way, the use of this material is relatively new for the artist. Together with master artisan Sara Sorribes, she unconsciously propels the process toward a much more sensorial realm. Hefesto emerges from this impulse to release intuition and surrender to the process. As if she were a small child, she activates a mode of creation guided by instinct and play, seeking to reach a certain sense of calm.

Although photography has always been present in her practice, it now takes on a more central role, generating a pictorial, highly plastic investigation in relation to experimentation with glass. In Hefesto, glass enters into dialogue with photography within a single body of work, producing a set of pieces that complement those recently shown at Sala Robayera: the previously unseen works in this exhibition and those shown last year in Cantabria are part of the same process, part of the same relationship with fire.

For Uslé, her previous materials felt obsolete, while glass provides a series of qualities already present in her earlier pictorial work and connected to her personal and family memories, such as light and reflection. Uslé grew up in a water mill that has deeply shaped her imaginary and visual language; the irregular, handmade windows generated flashes through the movement of water and the unpredictable impact of light, creating spaces in which to lose oneself in the colors of glass kissed by the sun, reflected on the walls and transformed with the shifting sunlight. Everything begins with this encounter between light and its limit, within this threshold.

Through the plasticity of glass, the artist seeks to return to that instant—an instant in which what wants to be has not yet decided how. Fire and water resemble one another as mediating forces in processes of creation and, at the same time, destruction; both are energetic images. As she explains: “I feel that there is a reflection of my interior in each piece. Of that liquid that inhabits me. What flows within me. Plasma, blood, bile... Like water.” These works represent a return to the self and to inhabiting the body; they do not describe, but reveal their own will to be.

Elena Blesa Cábez Educator and researcher