El desnudo y la mirada

“Like a yearning for thematic balance, a sort of balancing of genres, Gironella Parra now bursts forth from another voice, whose most intimate tessitura forces us into silence and cont emplation”, says Antonio Calera-Grobet in the opening lines of his presentation to the exhibition El desnudo y la mirada. Far from the dramatization and the sad odes of femininity, Gironella presents in his exhibition an eroticism close to the concept of Octavio Paz, expressed in his essay, “La llama doble”: “sexuality raises the red flame of eroticism and this, at the same time, sustains and raises another flame, blue and tremulous: that of love”. As a metaphor for the love of eroticism, “Gironella Parra’s is a decanted eroticism that has been known to suspend between both extremes due to the success of its artifice”. Thanks to a tone of comforting insinuation, the viewer is invited to create dialogues between the female nudes made by Gironella and the gaze awakened by the nude women in situ that inhabit the showcases, paired museographically in the exhibition.

El desnudo y la mirada was exhibited at the Arcos Itatti Gallery, Mexico City, in 2002. The exhibition comprised works made of monotype, printing, fresco, drawing and printing, ink and acrylic, acrylic on amate paper, encaustic, encaustic and oil on wood, encaustic on wood, as well as a bronze with alebrijes claws, 24 creations in all.