Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Cenobio [Cenoby]

Image caption
PILAR INSERTIS

Cenobio [Cenoby]

  • 1986
  • Oil on canvas
  • 230 x 190 cm
  • Cat. P_566
  • Acquired in 1994
By:
Frederic Montornés

Pilar Insertis has always been interested in the depth of landscapes where humans have a role merely as actors. Consequently, rather than appealing to reality, she creates landscapes as intriguing scenarios that evoke states of birth or renewal which seem to have emerged from the imagination and which appear as illustrations of literary narratives. From the outset, Insertis showed an interest in mythology and in depicting fauns or homus antiquus, characters from classical tales, whom she placed in disturbing settings with an emphasis on reflecting on civilisations and the passing of time.

Cenoby (1986) is a scenario halfway between the figurative and the abstract, dominated by a staircase leading up to what could be a hollow in a tree-trunk. This is one of Insertis’s early works and it bears witness to a time when many artists championed artistic freedom and reacted against abstraction, approaching the canvas with their minds open to different influences, which in the case of Insertis included mythology.

It is a poetic work of chromatic austerity in which the staircase, as a constructive element, reflects the interest of many artists of the 1980s in architectural and urban figuration in reaction to the excessively rural image that had predominated in art since the end of the Spanish Civil War. This was a type of post-modern response that took the city as a symbol of the new and considered architecture as the best yardstick of the renewal sought.

Frederic Montornés

 
By:
Frederic Montornés
Pilar Insertis
Madrid 1959

After graduating in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1983, Pilar Insertis was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1988 to travel to New York, where she lived for four years. In 1989 she obtained the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (Long Island, USA). In 1993 she travelled to Rome on a grant from the Spanish Academy of History, Archaeology and Fine Arts, and lived there for a year.

Even though her initial output comprised mainly paintings and sculptures, she soon began using the new computer technologies in her work, with forms of artistic expression such as video, 3D animation and computer graphics. Her works are brimming with symbolism and double meanings and are open to multiple interpretations depending on who is looking at them. As María Teresa Román explains: ‘A landscape coloured by symbols and metaphors, a fertile space where the imagination overflows, causing evocative images of moods, where colour, verticality, human and animal form, the sphere, the demiurgic and the protean come together to create an atmosphere of potentiality, mystery and plenitude’.

In 1986 her first solo show took place at the Edurne Gallery in Madrid. Immediately afterwards Insertis was selected to take part in the ‘1981-1986. Pintores y escultores españoles’ [‘1981-1986. Spanish Painters and Sculptors’] group exhibition organised by the La Caixa savings bank and curated by María de Corral, in which her works were shown alongside those of Susana Solano, Miquel Barceló, Juan Muñoz and others. From then on, Insertis’s work was regularly exhibited at the Antonio Machón Gallery in Madrid and at many other art galleries, museums and foundations including the Kunsthaus (Nuremberg, Germany, 1988); the Zolla Lieberman Gallery (Chicago, United States, 1991); the ICO Museum (Madrid, 1993); the Pilar y Joan Miró Foundation (Palma, 1994); the John D. Mooney Foundation (Chicago, United States, 1997) and the Raab Galerie (Berlin, 2003) to name but a few.

Frederic Montornés

 
«Transfiguration» (Madrid, 2007-2008).
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.