Les artistes de la Galerie

née en 1969 à Santa Fe, Argentina

vit et travaille à Faenza, Italie

Bourses d'études:

Expositions personnelles

Principales expositions collectives

Distinctions:

Collections

Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza. Italia.
Palais de Glas, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Museo Provinciale di Belle Arti G. di Rodriguez. Santa Fe, Argentina.

Oeuvres publiques

Comune di Faenza, Cada noche oscura espera el alba, installazione nell cortile comunale di via Barbavara 19/14. Italia.

Galleries

Galleria Il Fischio, Torino, Italia
Giardino Segreto, Roma, Italia
Galleria Catùs, Bologna, Italia
Galerie Orfeo, Luxembourg

Human-Human

Ana Cecilia Hillar is a young Argentinean artist (born in Santo Tomè in 1969) who has chosen clay, la tierra, and the most primitive of ceramic techniques as a privileged medium in her poly-sensorial and poly-material research because she considers it most intimately connected to her natural method of expression. For some years, the sculptress has been driven by a strong conviction that with time has become a sort of categorical imperative: “ Me entrego a creer, formamos parte de la tierra” “I dedicate myself to believing, we are all part of the earth.”
The intensity and force of these words, which when detached from their context, might make one think of some kind of gloomy intuition, are taken from Ana Cecilia Hillar’s reflections about ceramic matters, published in the catalogue of an exhibition given by the ceramicist in her hometown in Argentina in 1997. The power of this assertion, from which emerges a strong poetic statement, becomes emblematic of all the sculptress’ work.Two years have past since Ana Hillar was revealed to international ceramic critics as the winner of the 52nd edition of the Faenza Award in 2001.The installation intitled “Sombra del Viento/ Wind Shadow”. The work was attributed “a strong emotional impact”, an example of “the great ability of the artist to combine the imagery of the local tradition with a fully contemporary language”. The installation presented numerous biomorphic elements of browned terracotta, coloured only by the dark shades that result from reduction firing; bunched in a sort of ceramic cluster that hangs in the air on transparent wires inside a light metal structure. Sombra del Viento became a sort of evocative and nostalgic recreation, in Italy, of the signs that the wind sketches on the landscapes of Catamarca, the Argentinean region in which Ana lived before moving to Europe, comparable to the traces that the same places have left in the memory and soul of the artist.
Ana Hillar maintains to have chosen “ clay as a material for its dimension of simple intimacy”. The artist loves looking for that interiority but also for form: “ …So time stands still and I find myself following a ritual that has been repeated thousands of times in the history of mankind.” Working the soil, the material of all places, means establishing a contact with local tradition and travelling back to the memory of a place through its material culture1. Ana Hillar, as I have mentioned on a previous occasion2, is an extraordinary scholar of what I defined as the “poor” face of ceramics, the typical “terracotta style” of archaeological production, recovered by art in our century through certain post-informal experiments conducted by sculptors such as Spagnulo, Valentini and Mainolfi. The clay chosen by Ana Hillar is a clay taken from soil, from a physical place that confers an inexhaustible potential of metaphorical, symbolic and especially energetic content on the material; Like Nanni Valentini, Ana loves to think that “the soul of a place is in it’s soil3 ”. In effect, it’s in the investigation of that soil’s memory, extracted directly from a place, and in the research of the inborn spirituality of the ceramic material itself, that the poetry of our artist is recaptured, whose work seems to be “guided” by some sort of natural imperative, perceptible in the attitude, in the choices of material and techniques and in the design of forms and colour.
The “poverty” of the materials and techniques proudly exhibited in the sculpture works of the artist has a direct verification in its anthropological and ethnographical interests. In effect, the professional relationship between Hillar and the world of pre-Columbian archaeology meet in her succeeding specialization in ceramic restoration. In the Argentinean artist’s pieces, there is an immediate will to merge nature (material and space) and culture (Mankind’s memory of the history of places). In a representative intervention in a small medieval village in the Emilian Apennine mountains called Scuola di Vimignano in 1997, Ana Hillar installed her ceramic pieces in harmony with their surroundings, as if they had been present there for centuries, in the most unexpected corners, on top of the little stone walls, or spitting out of the watersheds, perfectly integrated with the spirit of the place. In Hillar’s work, the camouflage of the sculptures in the landscape, that buds as the sculptures’ and location’s will to integrate, can also transfer from a natural landscape to an artificial environment created within a gallery; installed like the material tracks of a journey or an outline, contemporarily seen by the artist in direct contact with the elements of nature and then synthesized and transported elsewhere, to make one think of certain proposals, dear to the experiments of the so called European Land Art, in particular to the interventions by Richard Long.
From Ana Hillar’s “passion for soil” and her extraordinary material sensibility come two of her work’s characteristic features, that is to say, the developed attunement to texture and resonance, as Marshall McLuhan4 confirms, from the archaic and recuperated culture’s of this century of experiences in contemporary art, especially in the research of the neo-a vanguard. Ana elevates the tactile aspect of the manipulation of clays, to the inquiry of the irregular grains of the chamott soils, to the exploration of the scabbed, rough surfaces, full of growths, protuberances, spines and needles. Hillar’s tactile investigations, don’t implicate only the experience of hands, but involve rather the totality of the body in the use of the space reclaimed for her ceramic installations. The resonance, on the other hand, refers to the myriads or sounds that originate in the fine ripples of the hanging terracottas, to the echoes that gush inside the hollow cavity like amphorae, to the artist’s steps traveling through territories and places in the nature and in thought.
“With Clay”, as told in an old Japanese tale, “vases and containers were thrown to contain oil and grains. It is also said that those objects were used to trap wind and to hear the resonance of voices.” Ana Hillar’s sculpture and ceramic objects can send one back to the concavity of the vase, their primordial archetype. In these cases, it’s in the intimate and secluded nucleus, its own, real fictile womb that the sculptural event is generated and takes place: clay prickles that emerge from coloured reservoirs, fossilized fangs within ancient mouths, daggers penetrating in dozens of wounds… The Argentinean’s sculptures, often propped on the ground, can also close up like hedgehogs to which a threatening convexity fosters violent dialogues with their surroundings.Then again, convex and sanded down forms can regroup in clusters and float silently upon water, or fluctuate soundly with the help of the wind, constantly whispering the same voice: Formamos parte de le tierra / We are all part of the earth.
We are of the earth and they want to be part of earth…This is what the innumerable anthropomorphic figurines lining the walls of the International Museum of Ceramics of Faenza seem to be saying, in a loud and suffocating outburst. In a personal Faentinian show, two years after the award, Anna Hillar proposes an aesthetic journey to be experienced like a voyage that examines and traverses the multiple dimensions of man. To be human, too human, with soul, body and an indelible mark left upon the world and upon reality. With all the potential shades. Anna Hillar’s artistic research promotes a metaphoric and metamorphic process from nature to art, from performance to sculpture, from event to document, in circular advancement that represents different inter-lingual levels, flanked by interweaving codes. All this resolved through “open form” sculpture, finely spatial and spectacular, with a continuous “cold” motif in the Mcluhanian5 sense. An attitude by which current art demands an inter-sensorial correlation and solicitation of the participative spirit and the fall of the privilege of visibility, stimulating a high grade of complicity of the public in the moment of use of the art piece and of the aesthetic operations. Anna derives from these prerogatives the necessity to substitute the artistic object with phenomenologies of an aesthetic communication. One that is involving from a spatial-temporal point of view, originating experiments that bring art to close contact with life and the materiality of body and of the world, through an original synthesis of expressive pulses and representative schemes.
Ana Hillar investigates the inexhaustible field of the human being, proposing the construction/deconstruction of the body, from its presence to its absence. All begins with the Stagno Magico-La Creazione (Magic Pond-Creation). The archetype of life, of love and of death, in its perpetual self-renewal. In the water we find the source and origin of all possible existences6. The primordial couple, in its evocative ritual nudity of the non-temporal Paradise model, emerges in the pre-formal element that dissolves all forms constructed by culture. And they both emerge purified by the waters that give birth to the sprouts and latent potentiality of life, materialized in the flowers of “good and bad” that will go on to pollinate the thriving uterus of nature. Todo el alma para el rocio is an aerial installation made up of hundreds of organic forms like hearts and cocoons. And the soul is actually born, like the mobile and ethereal light that defines immortality and transcendence. The sublime and untouchable spirituality vanishes in the proliferation of hearts, stripped of all material traces, emptied out of flesh, deprived of tissue, freed from the earth, forgotten by colour, ephemeral like dew, eternal like the god of all gods who, scrutinizing among the clouds, Watching the sky, searching for a house. The residence of whom Margherite Yourcenar calls, in the Memoirs of Adriano, “ my minimal soul, tender and fluctuating, guest and companion in my body” while she implores: “ Let us for one more instant, look at the familiar shores, the objects that we will undoubtedly not see again. (…) Let us try to enter death with open eyes.”7
Josune Ruiz de Infante
(Summary of Italian Umano-umano translated by: Elana Zysblat)

1. Ana Hillar. Obras 1997, catalogo della mostra, Santa Fe, Fundación Bica, 1997.
Cfr. Faenza oggi. Gli artisti della ceramica, catalogo della mostra, a cura di Josune Ruiz de Infante, Rifugio Gualdo 2001. Sesto Fiorentino, Gruppo Gualdo, 2001.

2. Cfr. Faenza oggi. Gli artisti della ceramica, catalogo della mostra, a cura di Josune Ruiz de Infante, Rifugio Gualdo 2001. Sesto Fiorentino, Gruppo Gualdo, 2001.

3. Ana Hillar conosce l’opera di Nanni Valentini nel suo primo viaggio in Italia nel 1996. In un catalogo argentino del 1997, Hillar scrive un intero testo parafrasando “una vecchia storia giapponese” raccontata dallo scultore italiano.
4.. McLUHAN, M., Understanding Media, 1964, trad. it., Gli strumenti del comunicare, Milano, 1967.

5. I media “caldi” non lasciano molto spazio che il fruitore debba completare. I media “freddi”, invece, costringono il pubblico a partecipare ed a completare l’opera dell’artista. Cfr. McLuhan, La galassia Guttenberg, trad. it., Roma, 1976.

6. Eliade, M., Imagenes y simbolos, trad. spa., Madrid, 1983.

7. Yourcenar, M., Memorie di Adriano, Paris, 1955