b. 1961, Las Palmas, Gran Canaria


CONTRIBUTION

Disparate no. 9 – Impregnaciones de Srta Nieve y guitarra
(Impregnation of Miss Snow and Guitar), 2011–ongoing
Performance, part of the series Disparates (Follies)

Disparates (Follies): plural, to say or do something without rhyme or reason; contrary to common sense; absurd, irrational. ‘Disparate’ from ‘disparar’ (to shoot), originally from ‘desbarate’: confusion and bewilderment as a result of firing a shot. Mónica Valenciano’s Disparates grew out of a nocturnal, sensed, somnambulist space and a chance encounter with Goya, which gave rise to a period of reflection that flowed into the process of Los Disparates. Much has been written on Goya’s Los Disparates: instinct heading blindly towards a horizon; strange and inscrutable; a kind of regression or evolution towards the obscure; dissemination of witchlike features; break with the world of logic; human, animal and vegetable worlds that coexist and intertwine; the primeval predating languages; nocturnal logic; images transformed into hieroglyphs; spiritual easing as a result of terror; transformations of the self; the representation of individual ghosts; labyrinthine, timeless space; the lucidity and clarity of the grotesque; a mirror that reveals what was hidden; laughter as a means to resist an excess of lucidity; fragmentary, chiaroscuro, unsettling confrontations, both monologue and unity. Characters, the night, mystery and the absurd, an embryonic world. The reality behind the apparent. (Mónica Valenciano)

Mónica Valenciano has offered up all her work and placed it under the divine and nocturnal protection of Francisco de Goya’s Los Disparates. Even when she introduces flamenco or bullfighting in her work, it still springs from this faith, from this threat. Her work has been described as a politicisation of Chaplinesque laughter, of Samuel Beckett’s absurd humour, of ‘laughter in the bones’. In 1997 she founded her company El Bailadero, and they have since presented all kinds of Disparates. Impregnaciones de Srta Nieve y guitarra (Impregnation of Miss Snow and Guitar) is Disparate no. 9, in progress since 2011.

RELATED PLATFORMS
Exhibition