Better than any of Tamara Arroyo’s exhibitions to date, “El arte de la memoria” (The Art of Memory) summarized her concerns as they are expressed in drawing. The title correctly posits memory and its relationship with artistic representation as the focal point of her work. Although her oeuvre is polymorphic (Arroyo has also used photography, architecture, video, and so on), it finds in drawing a precise medium for formulating analysis and venturing suggestion. The artist herself has no doubt about what she wants to intimate; for more than a decade, her work has involved the recovery of her past by means of images purportedly documenting her childhood. At the same time, Arroyo has never ceased to be aware of the fact that the exercise of memory entails invention, distortion, and falsification. She highlights the element of fantasy that all manual representation involves, establishing a direct relationship between the artist’s hand and subjective distortion. She suggests that art is a means of inventing or summoning desire, as opposed to reality. In this case, as Arroyo has stated, the desire in question is to recapture moments from her childhood, a time of her life when she was a sort of nomad who experienced an overwhelming sense of instability and loss of identity on account of her family’s recurrent moves.

The works shown here relate to the connections—fragile ones, Arroyo claims—between individual memory and images created on the basis of recollection. The three series of drawings in this show, as well as the fifty-minute video Curso de dibujo en movimiento (The Course of Drawing in Motion) (all works 2010), develop this idea. On the basis of memory and without the help of photographic documents, “Ejercicios de memoria II” (Memory Exercises II), “Ejercicios de memoria III” (Memory Exercises III), and “El arte de la memoria” depict spaces, events, and objects connected to the artist’s past, many of them linked to members of her family and her sentimental bonds with them. The iconography of these drawings includes the various music devices—cassette-tape player, stereo system, Walkman—in use when she was young, as well as the cars her parents owned. The series “El arte de la memoria” shows figures from classical statuary transformed into superheroes and other such childhood icons. The style of these images evokes the mirror play Arroyo has set up between drawing and photography: All of this work contrasts with the ability of photographs and related techniques to freeze time. Instead, the drawings imply that the ephemeral images produced by the mechanism of memory reflect largely invented recollections.

—Pablo Llorca

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.