Blanca Haddad
BLANCA HADDAD’s Spectacular Sphinxes: Mediums of the Here and Now
There are many kinds of mediums. Most channel thoughts, people or events that have to do with the past or future. These things are located in the realm of the imaginary, because the past and future are constructs that rationalize the continuum of time, creating the illusion that they can be retrieved.
Instead, Blanca Haddad’s Sphinxes are mediums of a here and now that we may be totally blinded by. It’s a here and now that overwhelms us with its barrage of shocking news and violent images flooding and eclipsing our vision on a daily basis. Thus, embracing the inquisitive character of the ancient figure of the mythic Sphinx, Haddad points to the core of critical questions we don’t dare ask ourselves as we witness the explosive world we live in today. Moreover. her Sphinxes seem to be key witnesses of phenomena that lodges in the depths of our unconscious mind, turning into phantoms that populate our dreams or nightmares, shadows that the “duendes” that inhabit our soul guard with zealous zest.
Haddad’s creative imagination is nurtured by the everyday: street scenes from a real underworld that she is familiar with, but that we probably choose to pass by, eyes shut. From there, Haddad collects a polyphony of pain, suffering, heartbreak, hunger, longing, despair, desperation, dismay, guilt, rage, desire, passion, and lastly, a plea for love: feelings we may have a glimpse of, as if sensing tips of icebergs floating in a sea of unawareness. From there, speaking through her oracular Sphinxes, Haddad heralds a new day, a day when we can finally see, “con la mirada limpia” with a clean heart. And thus, as we face the penetrating questions voiced by these hybrid creatures, half human, half animal, we experiment a catharsis, knowing at last that what illuminates inner truth suddenly hits us as an elated epiphany.
Such is the liberation experienced with Haddad’s poetic art or poesies. Because no matter how she delivers it, voicing it, drawing it with blunt gestural motions, her visual and oral messages are unquestionably present and intensely performative, directed to a live and responsive human audience.
Blanca Haddad’s art is transgressive in its innately explosive nature. Why? Because it dares cross the epistemic limits of each expressive media it engages. Her poetry transcends the limits of one voice to become a collective truth, her visual work, gushes out of its passive surface to engage the viewer with questions that beg immediate answers, aphorisms that accurately aim towards the core of an eccentric target.
As we confront the arresting images of Blanca’s series of Sphinxes - both small scaled and monumental - we understand that Blanca Haddad is a phenomenal artist and poet. All the expressive means involved in her art are intimately woven. Her powerful gestures, her traces on paper or canvas drawing stunning images, her passionate voice, her penetrating words, her intense gaze, her rhythm, her cadence, her charged silence... leave us mesmerized… in a state of trance. Nothing is superfluous in her art: everything stems from a visceral necessity.
Beyond what every contemporary artist learns from a predecessor or master, Haddad’s art alerts us to what was first generated by the ancestral drive that invented human language.
Photo by Carolina Otero