“It smells like iron!” said my friend Sergi when we were coming down from the Mauberme, a craggy peak at the northern end of the Aran Valley, in the Central Pyrenees. To our right the rusty Unhola river rushed down, dyeing everything in its path an orangey red. Further up, from where we came, the mines of Liats and Urets – an old mining operation that once extracted lead and zinc – had opened deep holes in the mountain from which now, helped by rainwater, the iron ores were descending and rusting. It was a much easier descent than what was once necessary to transport the extracted metals, helped by complex systems of pulleys, tracks and iron wagons, abandoned up there and now also rusted. We climbed that Mauberme all out.
Back in Galicia, I go down to a hollow mountain, an open sky from which copper was extracted until the eighties; the controversial mine of Touro and O Pino. It is a huge hole in the mountain that now, more than thirty years later and helped by the use of technosols to accelerate the appearance of vegetation, has become a Reactive Wetland: a landscape sculpted by force with its stepped cliffs and patched with high tech vegetation with a strong smell of sulfur and metal. From the mine slopes, the constant rain sweeps away the acids until they reach rivers like the Portapego, now completely red and turned in some periods into a real clayey quagmire stained with rust, like quicksand, blocking everything in its path. I know because I tried to get close and my legs were blocked up to the knees, so I picked up oxides at that same point of the river and get out of there with an iron determination.
From these two experiences germinates a series of iron paintings; they emerge from agitated processes engraved in nature itself and that use iron oxide and river water as the only material. Taking the cycle of the water and the river as a visible sign of a brutal transformation of the landscape happened above, at the top of a mountain, operated by the human activity of the metallic mining. ‘Iron’ uses force to drag the wet paintings across the landscape itself, in a process in which the grass becomes a chaotic army of brushes. It rubs against nature and uses it, and yet all that force that is engraved on the surface of the canvas is able to coexist with a certain gentleness thanks to the movement of water, looking for that natural balance. The vegetation is not represented, it is simply there and it is made of iron. Just like the river. Just like the wind and the stratified landscape. Everything is liquid and undulates in a more or less dense movement. The landscape paints itself; ironing out itself.
irene grau
*”A hierro” is a Spanish expression with no translation. Something made of iron, strong, made using the force; implies agressivity, bull also means full blast, doing something with all your energy, intensity.
A hierro
IRENE GRAU
5th October – 7th December 2024
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Sol 45, bajo. 39003 Santander.
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:30AM – 1:30PM / 6 – 9PM