The disturbing fissure in the gaze

By Lucas Fragaso.1997.
Nora Aslan exhibition in Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.

…’The rugs and tablecloths that hang from the walls correspond to an exact idea of visibility, to the faithful eye and the sincere hand which at some time sustained a strictly descriptive visual culture, alien to any narrative intention. The everyday character of the objects renders even more definitive the power of the images – constructed according to the system of replicas and unfolding that pertain to textile art- which offer themselves as symbols recognized immediately in the ornamental geometric compositions. The configuration of each one of these works does not need any external reference; they are only what they are: rugs and tablecloths destine to cover surfaces in the most proximate and familiar relationship with the objects that surround us. The gaze is here, in short, only an instructive activity that almost distractedly looks over the rigorous ornamental display. The composition resolves itself in the formal delimitation which does not attempt to express any interiority nor to establish and psychological affinity. Nevertheless, something absolutely different awaits this satisfied and distracted gaze…

…The gaze suddenly finds itself retained by the ornamental play of Nora Aslan’s rugs and tablecloths; the images transform into a disturbing power; the visual appearance not only returns the gaze but, in untimely fashion, thousands of hallucinated eyes vibrate in the decorative interweave of the textile surfaces, to become masters and inhabitants of a space without openings nor gaps: the space of the dreadful. If the unresolved tension placed between that which looks at us and that which we see forms the fundamental problem of the visible, and if this makes looking – as once someone called it – a torment, then the Nora Aslan’s tablecloths and rugs consciously and premeditatedly take on the dialectic of the gaze: they are concrete and visible examples of what they exemplify. The capacity that images have of returning the gaze is literally shown in each of these works as an unavoidable reality and event.’