Just as the New York exhibition celebrates its 100th anniversary, in which Marcel Duchamp exhibited his famous work ‘Fuente’ and which changed the meaning of the visual arts forever, the Uruguayan artist Anna Rank not only restores the plastic value of the line and the human figure, but also defies its limits and, at the same time, keeps alive the legacy of Joaquin Torres Garcia and his ‘Escuela del Sur’.

In the work of Anna Rank there are permanent presences. Geographies and concepts with proper names, or proper names that are themselves or become concepts and geographies. Geometry, deconstruction, Dominican Republic, the School of the South, New York, bidimension, Puerto Rico, tridimension, Paris, relief, emptiness, Montevideo, the rational and the game, Buenos Aires, Joaquin Torres Garcia and Jacques Derrida. All of this is communicated through a line and always with a human figure as a landscape and a permanent presence.

“It’s true that my parents studied at the Taller Torres-Garcia. They were both artists. My mother was a painter and my father a set designer. I had the opportunity, as a child, to be surrounded by the fantasy of theatre and painting. I therefore got to know the School of the South from within.”
And so the journey of their artwork began by means of a daring line, one that questions the limits of logical anatomy and technical support, and which makes us lose ourselves and find ourselves in natural and surprising places.

“At the beginning I did not want to be an artist like my parents, of course. I painted hidden constructions, mainly using triangles and curves as a rebellion against the vertical and horizontal lines taught by the Taller Torres-Garcia.”

Today, however, geometric structure is discernible and perceived in the construction of Anna Rank’s images, like a subconscious presence, which sustains the sensuality and the ease of her lines and strokes. And there is a reason why.
“Geometry is the scaffolding that builds the work. It can either be seen or not. It can be found just as much in a geometric painting as in a figurative one. It is what structures the work and what sustains it.”

But it is not only the arithmetic conception of geometry that sustains the work of Anna Rank.
“The Humanism of Torres-Garcia, expressed through Constructive Universalism, taught me to work the geometric-organic composition; and the Post-Humanism, with its idea of Deconstruction, helped me visualise the human figure composed of various images which shaped my anthropomorphic signs.”
Anna Rank’s exhibition, “Human Symbols” at the Cultural Space of OEI, is composed of four series, which could well be considered to be four plastic challenges which simultaneously raise the aesthetic concept of ‘unity’ in the aesthetic development of their searches and their intention to push the limits of the value of ‘the line’, and of the human figure, as a theme.

On the one hand, there are her drawings and paintings. Firstly, from the bidimensional where Anna Rank demonstrated the maturity of her trade, there is the security and sensuality of the stroke and the security that gives Anna her geometric ‘expertise’. On the other hand, there are her ‘reliefs’, which show her challenge of taking her knowledge of the picture plane above and beyond, and her intention to involve herself in the game of overcoming formal limits posed to her by the development of her images.

In the series of ‘the wires’, she takes the possibilities of the line to the extreme, as an instrument and as a plastic value, maximising its reach, playing with the light, the shadow, the background, and the point of view of the spectators, making them essential factors of the work.

Lastly are ‘the stamps’, which breaks all exhibition patterns, entering and incorporating the space and crossing the path of each spectator. How would you describe the evolution of your images and your work from the era of the School of the South to your work today?

“I really think that for a strange reason the two are coming closer together as time goes on. The curve of the wire bodies are references to the curves of my first paintings and the stamp series ‘Human Symbols’ are references to the anthropomorphic geometry that has always fascinated me in the pictograms of the pre-Columbian culture, and that Torres Garcia urged us to investigate in his teachings.”

Technique-image or image-technique? Which leads to which? The hand to the mind or the mind to the hand? In your case, which is stronger?
“I think that in my work, technique and image give back to each other. In the case of a relief, I can discover an image because of the technique. And when drawing and working with wire sculptures, I have an image and the technique synthesises it and multiplies it in a counterpoint between form and emptiness.”

In the series ‘Human Signs’, using the wire, you take a step further by playing with the line, the light, the shadow and the position of the spectator. How did the process of discovery and experimentation of the resources finally make you take the decisions that led to the realisation of the series?
“In the installation ‘Spectrum’ I had already played with the projected shadows of branches, and it was an incredible experience to see the spectator inside of the branches. Trapped again in the bidimensional of drawing, I needed to escape the plane, and the idea of wires and emptiness and multiple lines appeared; it was a new world for me, and a world that I continue to explore.”

Tell us about the stamps.
“Torres Garcia, from Uruguay, urged his students to investigate archaic cultures, especially the Pre-columbian; not to copy them, rather to work our own images in their mediums.
I worked with collectors of Pre-colombian art in New York and in the Caribbean. I mainly studied the Tainos and their wonderful petroglyphs, which I incorporated into clothing projects. Years later, during my scholarship in Paris, the anthropomorphic images began to appear in museum collections again, as much in the archaic Pre-colombian culture as in the Mesapotamian, through stamps that fascinated me for their artistic and communicative versatility and which inspired me to start the project ‘Human Symbols’. In this series, I return to clay, working in stamps. They are extremely synthetic reliefs. I print their images like the Pre-colombians did, onto leather, onto fabrics, not only creating a print but also an embossing, multiplying the image.

You work very closely with Nadia Paz, your curator. How did that link work? Do you think the role of the curator together with the plastic artist is important, as in the case of the producer with the musician, or the editor with the writer?

‘Nadia Paz, for years, has assisted me enriching my didactic and theoretical projects. She is an artist and was a student of mine. Therefore, she knows the School of the South from the inside. That is what enables her to understand all of my comings and goings between Construction and Deconstruction, through reason or by instinct. Nadia understands my work from her constructive experience, and she has the magic to visualise it and communicate it.’
Emptiness and presences, limits and challenges, structures and games, sensuality and geometry, yesterday and today, opposites which complement each other and similarities that provoke each other. All that is in Anna Rank’s ‘Human Symbols’. Like in an amusement park, in between joy and reflection.