Diana Larrea. Tiempos y formas.

During her career of nearly ten years, the Madrid-born artist Diana Larrea (1972), has maintained her position as one of the most prestigious representatives of Spanish art. She has produced work that can be categorised as existing of two opposing positions with respect to the central subject in art today, the litigation between reality and fiction or better still, between the different ways in which they can be seen. The artist moves in the world of fiction, creating portraits of herself as some of the film stars who belong to the masses, but she also plays an inverse role, and this is relevant here, as she filters fiction into real spaces, but means of artistic projects in public spaces. In the first variant of her art, she tackles the temporality and validity of the icons of our culture, and in the second, she explores the time of the artwork, beyond its mere presence. Her projects go beyond the duration of the exhibition and remain in the echo that reverberates after them.
In her Zaragoza project, Diana Larrea proposes a synthesis between water, architecture and time. It is condensed into the form of the spiral, a form with a long iconographic tradition from the era of megalithic relief to our days. Spirals are associated with the symbolism of cyclical elements, which go beyond the physical world in certain cultures and are included in cosmological systems that contain, in many cases, an extraordinary mysticism. Diana Larrea has opted for bricks to represent the spiral, in reference to the material used in Mudejar architecture, and therefore, she traces the link between meaning and significance, between brick and water, through the thriving coexistence between the different artistic trends present in this piece of architecture. And water, today in Zaragoza, is also a unifying principle that conciliated cultures.
Diana Larrea’s works in public spaces always aim to achieve an intimate relationship with the general public. Her works at the Arganda roundabout in La Calzada in Gijón, and in Valverde Street in Madrid, encourage observers to explore the notion of temporality that goes beyond the physical space. Robert Smithson, author of the most famous spiral of the 20th century, wrote incessantly about time in art, about the before and the after of the physicality of the work. In Diana Larrea’s public projects the evocation and the memory of the work have as much force as their own presence.

Javier Hontoria
Expo Zaragoza catalogue