Produced by the artist Victoria Civera in 1991, the work Two in the Afternoon is a manifestation of her exploration of time through abstraction. Applying mixed techniques on canvas, she employs a soft palette – black, ochre, and white – and organic forms that intertwine in a dynamic and fluid composition. The title of the piece, Two in the Afternoon, refers to the time of the artist’s birth, a detail of which her mother often reminded her, and adds an autobiographical dimension to the work, connecting it to the moment her life began. Civera uses painting to reflect on the passage of time, starting from that initial moment, from personal and subjective experience.

Her artistic approach involves a confluence of abstraction and figuration to construct visual narratives revolving around experiences and emotions. Two in the Afternoon comes from the stage in Civera’s development when, having settled in New York in the late 1980s, she began to explore geometric forms and understated compositions in smaller formats, occasionally adopting a discreet, almost miniscule scale. Deciding to use linear abstraction to represent an experience as intimate as birth underscores the artist’s commitment to experimenting with the potential of non-figurative language to express the personal. Through abstraction, the artist is able to transcend individual experience to evoke universal ideas about motherhood, femininity, and time. Combining geometric elements like the circle and straight lines with looser, more gestural strokes shapes the composition and reinforces the sense of temporality. The motif of the circle recurs throughout Civera’s work and takes on particular significance in Two in the Afternoon. Its repetition creates a rhythm and cadence that seem to allude to the intertwining of past, present, and future, evoking the cyclical nature of time and change as the only constant.

Two in the Afternoon thus fits within a broader theme of Civera’s, where the idea of the circularity of time is central. The artist has emphasized this particular conception of time throughout her career, both in her visual work and in her statements, even naming one of her solo exhibitions “El tiempo es circular en el silencio (Time is Circular in Silence),” held at the Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid, Spain) in 2023. The circle has been a defining element in Civera’s visual vocabulary since the 1980s and has remained through successive stages. She would later opt for the tondo format in series like Horizontes Circulares (2017) and in pieces addressing the corporeality of women from an abstract perspective, such as Uno (1) (sonido de útero) [sound of the uterus, 2017]. The artist herself has confirmed that the spiral began appearing in her work during her pregnancy in the early 1980s. In Two in the Afternoon, the circle not only acts as a central visual element in the composition but also seems to evoke the natural cycles of life, or perhaps the connection between different moments of existence. As in much of her work, in this piece Civera explores identity and motherhood from a female perspective. Two in the Afternoon invites the viewer to remember the moment of birth and the mother’s role as the agent and bearer of this memory. The work speaks to the personal history of a profound connection with the maternal figure, as well as the transmission of experiences and memories through affection.

Clara Derrac

Victoria Civera’s four works in the Banco de España Collection are from the time when the artist – who had been living in New York since the end of the previous decade – formed part of a clear internationalisation of Spanish art coinciding with the return to democracy in Spain and the search for standardisation through culture. Without turning her back on “painting for painting’s sake”, Civera began to experiment again in the 1990s, to embrace an objectual nature, as can be seen from her use of wire mesh in Untitled (1992), an example of the trend towards circular composition that was already visible in her work in the early 1980s, as well as a material change that would steer her from then on to installations beyond painting in the strictest sense, a gesture indicative of the formal hybridisation that has characterised her work.

The three purely pictorial pieces reflect a personal repertoire favouring austerity, where the organic and geometric dialogue in harmony, and the linear and apparently rigorous abstraction appears to be constantly challenged by a certain gestural and, sometimes, biomorphic nature, as can be seen from the forms that evolve in Tel tech (1992). The preference for the small or medium format, typical of Civera of that time, reveals an interest in the intimate and a sensitivity that would then become an approach to a certain iconography of what it means to be female and the forms of cultural significance. Yet it is also related to the focus, during that period, on unrushed painting in which the expressive is sacrificed to the reflective, where Civera distanced herself from the debate between abstraction and figuration.

Carlos Martín