Clara Esborraz

Santa Fe, Argentina 1991

            One of the most powerful elements of Clara Esborraz's work is her generational awareness. Since her early participation as an intern in La Basurita, a training workshop for visual artists in the province of Santa Fe aimed at investigating the survival of past cultural, artistic and institutional ecologies, her drawings seek to shape an experience of the present in tension with the imaginary of youth. Although her work could be described as a revival of punk because of its overt violence, the means she uses and the characters she dissects, her attention is less oriented to rebellion and nihilism than to the exploration of current conditions to configure the ways of self-perception, build one's own identity and think about dissidence. Her production can be understood, thus, not as a channel of expression, but as an investigation on the uncertainty of the times and the strange relationship between freedom and precariousness.

            Already based in Buenos Aires, she participated in 2017 in the Artists Program of the Di Tella University and, in 2018, in the URRA residency, where she refined a repertoire of motifs contaminated by this common sense of fragility. The body and the skin, the work space, affective circuits, domesticity as an ever-foreign habitat began to underpin a poetics installed in an everyday examination of relationships with others or of the self as other. Likewise, this self-reflexive horizon between the real and the imaginary finds its formalization in the techniques she works with. In her numerous solo exhibitions, drawing in biro –first in black and then using the modest spectrum of colors offered– became a distinctive mark of her pieces. So are the ordinary, thin and austere supports she implements, such as bookcel paper. The result is a productive use of materials that contain this possibility and need to inscribe themselves in the present, but that show the provisional and contingent character of these graphic interventions. In parallel to her drawings, she also created a series of performative scenes in which she interrogates corporeality as a limit and as a repetition against which new identities can be conceived. In this way, her works take the form of posters and the space mutates into a youthful room, into the critical space of experiments with oneself.