The interior of a book has a paradoxical character. It is located inside but it is intended to be outside. Writing a book responds to the necessity of connecting with someone who is not in front of you, someone who will get to know you while reading you, someone who will know you without you seeing them.
In this series created by Cecilia de Tavira, this book is an unburied object that opens internal architectures. Among these objects there even are buildings, whose windows let you see the life of miniature families in their daily solitudes. In other notebooks (who originally were accounting books and which are numbered as a scientific logbook is numbered, a characteristic of the XIX century) there is something within their visual references that is one step towards positivism and another step from the travel journal. These notebooks have received the name of “paisajes” or “landscapes” by their author and in them, a miniature character looks towards the horizon. While looking at them, one cannot avoid remembering the romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. The accomplished resin crack makes the landscape to open up its human tri-dimensionality into a miniature melancholic sunset. In the objects that have a visual likeness with the family album, one can “write” the end of childhood fictions. Innocence, good and evil are all inscribed in quotations in them and there is a suggested sadness that travels the color veins of these small albums.
This intimate series started with a tragic event in the life of its author: the violent loss of her father. This work carries the name “Un Libro Sobre Mi Padre” or “A Book About My Father” and translates in its pages paintings of a life known in remnants and stitches, which suggests the way that the book is “sewn.” Mounted or inserted photographs on the inside pages that are not seen are accompanying it, as well as a mobile cinematographic stroll. In this way, her conciliatory shame and sense of reparation opens up. Cecilia de Tavira is a Mexican artist who inherits the best moments of French surrealism, although everything that she has dreamed about she has done while watching the crude things in life, with open eyes.
-Valerie Mejer Caso
Text for the exhibit “Interior Notebook” in the Four River Cultural Center, Oregon