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CURRO SANCHEZ

Itinerarios 18 - Hilvando encuentros
Museo de Artes Decorativas
Madrid, 2018

THE ART OF CONVERSATION WITH SILK

“Silk is reserved, says Kima. And who will know better than her, after a lifetime of dialogues with silk, coaxing it to tell what it suggests, what it hints, what it whispers, what it hides, what silk may get to say but will keep from those who do not know its genuine language, lacking words, without nouns and adjectives, commas or periods. Silk has its own grammar, its own syntax, its vocabulary, its orthography: it communicates via brush strokes, transparencies, combinations and superimpositions, textures and colours, hues, nuances of light and shadow, and it does so at the pace of silence broken by the soft graze of the brush, the subtle creak of the frame.

Kima masters the language of silk, its inflexions, turns and ways with such dexterity that having talked with silk for so long she managed to break the natural discretion that characterizes it, as she says, and became its confidante, the depository of its knowledge, laments, sorrows, worries, joys and sufferings, even its secrets. Secrets that Kima is careful never to reveal entirely, without going beyond whispering about them, hinting, suggesting, covering them up, in order not to break the mystery that must be kept in every form of expression that wants to reach art’s level. The art of conversing with silk, that Kima offers us in every one of her creations”.

PILAR PARCERISAS

itineraris 17 - Tres miradas des del tèxtil, p. 5
Centre de Documentació i Museu Tèxtil
Catalogo de l’exposició
Terrassa, 2017

EMOTIONS OF THE “AURA” OF AN ANCIENT TIME

“Contemporary creativity, guided by the libertarian spirit that accompanied artistic disciplines in the 20th century, empowered the evolution of textile art moving it towards the codes of painting, sculpture and interdisciplinary installation.

Kima Guitart presents RAINING PRAYERS, a three-dimensional piece of a symbolic nature, inspired by the Buddhist prayer banner, and a set of silk works, SILK MAPS, the originals from the book of the same title that come together with poems by Susanna Rafart.
Just like rain, the strips of white organza silk fall freely and move softly displaying paintbrush strokes of watery colours, golden signs that spread memories, prayers, emotions. A festive mood emanates from the ritual whiteness, recalling memories of her mother, a dressmaker famous for her wedding dresses.
The maps are small paintings, miniatures calling forth immense spaces, projecting towards infinity. Like medieval miniature books, these maps spread symbols, crosses and circles over a deeply spiritual, almost mystical field, close to the spiritual mood of a Rothko. The use of gold foil reaffirms the sacred character the artist wants to confer upon these maps of intimacy”.

ASSUMPTA DANGLA

Datatèxtil, n. 30, pp. 43 f.
Circuit de Museus Tèxtil i de Moda a Catalunya
Terrassa, 2014

THE UNKOWN SIDE OF KIMA GUITART

“Watching Kima Guitart paint, we see how she breathes life into silks of the finest quality, how she bathes them in the Mediterranean and how she brings together her experiences of exotic countries and Eastern philosophy to create her beautiful calligraphies. Her brush slides gracefully over the silk as if it were canvas; the aniline dyes are skilfully mixed together on the silk stretched out on a frame where she sketches her compositions of such harmony and energy. Kima, textile artist and designer, welcomes us to her workshop. The sunlight gives life to her hand-dyed silks, which are either unique creations or designs for screen printing. With this vibrant light that gives meaning to her work, her silks possess an aesthetic beauty worthy of a work of art. Trained at the School of Arts and Crafts in Barcelona, Kima expanded her horizons by studying at design schools in Florence, Paris and New York. Her desire for exploration then took her to Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, and the Ivory Coast in Africa, and to Kyoto in Japan. A pioneer in Spain in the technique of painting on silk, Kima’s work is eclectic and ranges over several creative fields including murals, dresses, and accessories. She also carries out commissions for institutions and firms. Her creations have been displayed at individual and collective exhibitions in art galleries in Spain, Europe, the US and Japan, and she has also exhibited in fashion shows in Barcelona, Madrid, Berlin, Cambridge and San Francisco.

Kima Guitart’s work reveals a profound understanding of the history of art, and also of the countries she has visited and the cultures she has encountered. At the same time, she has managed to remain faithful to her Mediterranean roots. Her creations reflect a wish to modernize the tradition and also a clear commitment to avant-garde art”.

DANIEL GIRALT-MIRACLE

Geometries - Sedes pintades
Artesania Catalunya
Barcelona, 2009

CONSTRUCTING, DECONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING

“Kima Guitart is a good example of the type of artist who has a driving need to experiment, which not only pushes her work forward but undergoes profound metamorphoses. Having said this, it all carries the same clear personal stamp. For all the changes of colours, calligraphies, themes, material textures and the very way the garments are conceived, the plastic language is unmistakably hers. Nonetheless, Kima Guitart’s work is not easily defined: whether she paints large surfaces, decorates scarves or designs folding screens and dresses, she suprasses the constraints of techniques by always coming up with new ideas.

The latest series presented here is an excellent example of all this. It highlights certain items of clothing that reflect the undaunted development of her work and at the same time are entitites unto themselves, to my mind almost architectural constructions.

Kima Guitart began her career constructing dresses that she made into wearable art; pieces that she later deconstructed by subverting the models to bring informal and unique solutions to clothing, which in her current phase - that I refer to as reconstructing - she treats in a special way in that she allows constructivist-based or neoplasticist geometry to play a major part because her patterns are far removed from the mainstream. These are dresses with a random structure, vigorous ornamentation and either warm or cold colours in which it is the gesture of her writing painted onto the material that refers us to her plastic language.

Faced with these creations we may ask ourselves whether Kima Guitart’s work falls into the realm of fashion, design, craft production or art, and yet we would never come up with the right definition because she touches on all of these fields and makes them her own. Drawing upon all of these fields she extracts the material and technical possibilities that most interest her and, using her ability to look at things afresh, she gives them a new form and a new life and makes them into new choices that respond to the mentality and behaviour of her contemporaries”.

CORREDOR MATHEOS

Kima Guitart: Camins d’Aigua
Galeria Montcada
Barcelona, 2004

WATER JOURNEYS

“Reality is slippery and it escapes through our fingers if we try to catch it. Art, the best art, sensible and well grounded as it may seem, shares this condition with things we consider real. Kima Guitart’s work is a good example of this. The very title of this exhibition makes this point. In these silks, the opacity of wool and the sheen of silk compensate each other and reach a subtlety that is solid and transparent at the same time.

There are no shapes to talk about. There are circles and curving lines, and spirals as well, a few of which remind us of the famous double spiral of DNA. Shape unfolds and seems to close in on itself, without quite doing so, as if it tried to take shelter in itself. The world is taking form or is just so, in constant fluctuation. It makes more sense to talk about colour signs or strips that stretch out horizontally spanning the space from one side to the other of a canvas, as if going to infinity.

Pigment and water run freely on the space chosen for it by the artist. Colour is never sharp, it does not claim our attention. Tonalities are reddish, dark, blue-gray, ochre, watery green. Tenuous, delicate, liquid , like the shapes. The artist does not wish to provoke us, nor that we stop at any set point. Everything moves, oscillates, and shines through uncountable points of light. The whole space vibrates and everything states that art is one and that the work of Kima Guitart, while it makes an impression on our sensitivity, resonates with ancient cultures at the same time as belonging entirely to the present.

Or while belonging entirely to the present”.

PILAR PARCERISAS

Kima Guitart: Mural Silks
Fundació “la Caixa”
Catalogo de l’exposició
Barcelona, 1993

MURAL SILKS

“Always a transgressor in spirit, Kima Guitart has broken away from the conventions binding the ancient Japanese techniques of handpainting on silk in order to endow them with a sensibility more closely attuned to western culture. By using extremely liquid anilines she manages to create on the silk the same effect as watercolour on paper, so extensively utilized and so artistically rich throughout Oriental iconography. With the use these inks she obtains a broad spectrum of transparencies which make up the palette of these wall-silks mounted on stretchers. The silks, imported from China, India and Japan, are natural supports which become fields of action, pentagrams for abstract compositions, signs of vital spontaneity that have found their reflection in the symbolic.

An expert in the field of the fashion show and the balancing of the relations between clothes and the human body, Kima Guitart is now seeking in the mural dimension another, different, conception of space and time. The depth of the surface, the support as open, limitless space, incline us towards seeing in these large silks colour fields carrying resonances of the space Rothko conquered. Rich ranges of reds, blues, greys, ochres are ready to capture the gesture with all the potency of which the hand is capable by means of a single expansive movement.

Kima Guitart has arrived at a perfect symbiosis between the most ancestral past and the most vitally immediate present, just as Picasso, Wilfredo Lam and so many of the surrealists did in their day. On the one hand, at the level of technique, she traces an arc linking the cultures of West and East, following the steps of the old silk and spice route; while on the other she imports the exoticism of primitive Africa; two routes that converge precisely on the Mediterranean. Daughter of this culture, the artist has forged a synthesis from the traditional techniques of Japanese hand-painting and Western culture, from which she has drawn the purity, movement and gestural quality of American abstract expressionism. From Africa, the asceticism of the primitive sign, its repetitive lyricism and high symbolic charge. Her travels to Mali, Algeria, the Ivory Coast and the Upper Volta to learn the techniques of treating fabrics have not been for nothing. Perhaps there she discovered that the most archaic signs are still alive today because the human body continues to cast the same shadow.

These mural silks are musical and poetic. They present themselves as interior landscapes, strata of emotions accumulated through lived experience. This is an art that demands sensitivity of the eye, and the capacity to approach the tactile by way of the visual, and vice versa. Like the Japanese poets, Kima Guitart endeavours in her work to enter more deeply into the human mystery, an enigma without end”.

CALVO- SERRALLER

Kima. Pintura sobre seda, p. 5
Galeria Columela
Madrid, 1988

THE ROUTE OF SILK

“Shining, revealing, light, warm and caressing is silk. Successfully staining it demands possession not just of the concepts of colour science, but of the highly uncertain and risky art of tonal correspondences as well. The subtle lightness of the silk support, made more complicated by its extreme sensitivity to light, could be paralyzing. Too controlled an approach may end up in a boringly mechanical juxtaposition of industrial colours and tonalities; excessive liberty may simply end up in catastrophe. To obtain artistic control one needs a lot of thought and feeling and of course a secure hand. By soaking it, the technique of applying colour to silk may look like watercolour painting, like the expanding watery stains that leave a wake of gradually diffuse contour.

Kima paints, but in addition she narrates stories. But what is Kima’s story? It‘s an adventure through the silk route, searching for the horn of plenty Kima lives colour as an experience of flying, drifting and gliding in the wind. She walks in paths where one sees parades of worlds like dreamed-of realities, weightless visions. Silks become sails to fly and life turns into a dream”.

ROSA M. MARTIN I ROS

Dir. of the Mus. of Textiles and Clothing
Pasarela Gaudì
Barcelona, 1985

KIMA PRESENTS HER FIRST COLLECTION

For the first time, Kima Guitart presents a collection. We are facing a phenomenon unlike the usual ones in the world of fashion. It is as if the clock started moving backwards and instead of the products made in series of the industrial society we live in, we were shown exclusive, unique and unrepeatable items. For Kima Guitart offers us a parade of clothes designed and made one by one, each different from all others, where the art of making garments joins the art of painting, the latter keeping the strongest role.

This way to paint while keeping the two-idimensional character of cloth becomes three-dimensional as it covers the human body and acquires moviment as the latter moves. And for these paintings she uses the noblest of natural fibres: silk. All her work is in silk. All the forms of weaving silk into a flat cloth are used. Thus we see the shine of satin and the transparency of organdy together with the opacity and the subdued effects of matte silk, covered with brillantly colored or darker brush strokes, depending on how the material’s qualities offer her different options to experiment.

Her garments are made the traditional way, like nineteenth century waistcoats used to be embroidered. She directly outlines on the stretched piece of silk the shape that the garment will have and then applies colors. First, she paints the background parts, then the motifs that decorate them, using a RESERVA, a wash or other techniques. Her canvases, whether you call them clothes you dress with or paintings in their own right, are decorated with abstract shapes and broad brushstrokes, the result of evolution from figurative art, inspired by nature, that under the admitted influence of Japanese art arrives to pure abstraction, where the brushstroke is everything by itself, a way of expressing color.

The Japanese influence is not only in the brushstrokes that decorate the fabric, it also resides in the form of pieces, dresses, coats, blouses, and so on. It is clear in all her art. It is an influence that takes nothing away from the originality of these clothes, on the contrary, it gives to objects conceived for the western world an exclusivity and refinement typical of exquisite eastern items.

Kima Guitart’s creations are entirely unique objects, conceived, designed, painted and cut the craftman’s way, all by the same person. In them, form is a function of paint, which in turn is a function of form, thus making a symbiosis that can only be defined as true art.

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