Emerger de una flor no ofrece mejores vistas, 2025
Ceramic,wood, high-density foam, brass, textile, korean painting
65 x 48 x 100 cm
The ecstatic rapture brought on by dance and narcotic substances during Bacchic festivities staged precisely what Homer’s Odysseus feared most: self-forgetfulness, the loss of individuality, alienation. These celebrations of Asian origin were said to have initially attracted the marginalized groups of Athenian society—women and slaves. Thus, intoxication shaped a different kind of community: free, fleeting, and subversive. The Dionysian rite dismantled all allegiance to the symbolic order—something akin, in Hindu mysticism, to tearing the veil of Maya, the illusion that separates us from ultimate reality. Through its shredded edges, the Titans would appear—beings of chaos from a primordial era that classical Greece had banished from its cultural landscape, replacing them with the Olympian gods.
According to Nietzsche, the Greeks sought a balance between the Dionysian pull of the abyss and Apollonian harmony. That balance is essential, for if the veil of appearances were to remain torn for too long, the human world would vanish with it.
By reducing narration to its barest elements, the work allows space for interpretive ambivalence. While it doesn’t deny the lotus’s purifying power, it warns us of the danger of being burned to ashes among its fiery petals. The lotus becomes a metaphor for that which—in moderation—enlightens us, but in excess blinds and consumes. In sacred texts, gods and bodhisattvas bloom from this numinous flower, yet the piece titled Emerging from a Flower cautions us otherwise: a ceramic sculpture decorated with lotus motifs lies on its side like a fallen idol or a primordial creature in eternal slumber.
Anna Adell
Solo Show "En silencio se alzaron lotos"
C3A Andalusian center for Contemporary Creation, Córdoba, 2025
