Teresa Lanceta is not here

ANTONI MARÍ

I cannot but admire how Teresa Lanceta renounces her own originality in these fabrics, since at least a newcomer like me to the weaving art can barely distinguish her work from the traditional textiles making up the rest of the exhibition. This likeness is less about technical expertise or the lay- out of colours and forms, which she has so artfully emulated, and more about the common spirit which binds them.

A spirit not of reproduction or imitation, but the spirit of a creativity that can only manifest itself through the respectful but free assimilation of the traditional rules, laws and customs, never explicit, of a canon, and bear it forwards into such a different sphere, like Teresa Lanceta's, from the traditional sphere of its origins. But is it truly possible to renounce originality, understood as the expression of the most personal, intimate and unique of oneself? Or might it be that personal originality can merge indistinguishably with the originality of a collective? Or did the spirit of tradition perhaps fire the original spirit of our weaver? The answer to all these questions may well be a firm yes.

Teresa Lanceta, like any artist, began to practice art because of the force exercised by other artists' work on her own creative imagination. In this case, however, it is not the work of an individual artist which awakened the artist's creativity, but an entire collective personality, recognisable despite its countless variants and alterations as a singular and autonomous whole binding diverse individualities into a sole expressive vocation.

Teresa Lanceta, with her own determinants and contingencies, seems to melt away and forget herself in order to cede her place to the organising, constructive spirit rooted in a culture distant in space and time, but whose timeless modernity is proof against anything; for art after all is the form of culture which can bring together, mix and unite its diverse and multiple manifestations, careless of the demands of time and space.

There is little difference between the art of today and that practised in the beginnings of time, since we almost immediately recognise what it is truly artistic in its manifestation. And there are many similarities too in the diverse origins from which it sprung, since what art has of art is something that transcends the location, time and individual hand of its creator.

Teresa Lanceta is not here in this exhibition. But then perhaps, and most probably, Teresa Lanceta is present in every interstice, weft, warp, join and combination which makes up this multiple body of work, her own works and those of others, all woven by the same unique pair of hands and conceived out of the same creative intelligence for men to wonder at.