Into the Soul: Elsa Núñez anthological exhibition Catalogue Elsa Núñez’s continuity and versatility María Amalia León The main goal of an institution like ours that claims democratic principles, must be the promotion and stimulation of culture, so the greatest number of audiences will have access, consume, and benefit from cultural goods and services. From our historical contexts, that mandate acquires even more urgent significance. Considering the opportunities for improvement that the living conditions of our populations have, the practice of the arts represents an instrument to achieve the state of wellbeing that our communities deserve. For us, at Centro León, this mission is very important. With our practices, we seek to emphasize, on one hand, the encouragement of artistic creation, and on the other, the promotion of that creation and the communication arrangements between cultural offers and demands. With Into the Soul, the exhibition that we are dedicating now to the outstanding Dominican visual arts master, Elsa Núñez, we feel closer than ever to that founding mission. Elsa Núñez, a patrimony of our nation, has created a work that spans all the decades of the modern history of visual arts in our country. And has done it with a double quality: permanence and versatility. Constructing its own, identifiable, recognizable speech through the years, lustrums, and decades of an intense career, is one of the achievements that every artist would yearn to reach. It is not easy to create a unique language. In fact, it is one of the most arduous things to conquer in the complex profession of artistic creativity. There is no trajectory hierarchy, nor goal ranks, but there are actions for the consecration of a work. Artists like Paul Giudicelli who explored the value of aboriginal and Afro-Antillean heritages from his own language and means; like Clara Ledesma who developed a language full of introspective and poetic references; like Soucy de Pellerano who broke patterns and produced a solid and unprecedented body of work; or Ramón Oviedo who explored the variables of his context and gave a pictorial response to the everyday and the exceptional. Elsa Núñez did it by bringing everyone’s world, Into her Soul. To delve into our souls is to return to Ithaca, 156
to that reunion with ourselves. There the Homeric journey, the great odyssey of our lives. This exhibition, conceived and put together by Centro León, and curated by Paula Gómez and Miguel Piccini, covers the five decades of production of this fertile Dominican creator. The anthological format presents the experiences and development of the artist’s visual language, from her beginnings in the 1960s to the present day. Into the Soul is structured in five areas without chronological subjection, but articulated according to the ideas, experiences or languages that have driven the artist in her great creative moments. These are: Persistence of sorrow, Aesthetic transpositions, Praise to work, Woman. Life cycles and archetypes and Matter experiences. The pedagogical and mediation program conceived for this exhibition aims to provide new questions and insights. We start from the Methodology for the Integration of the Arts (MIA), enriching the questions and provocations, aimed at childhood and adulthood, with references to the daily life and imagination subjects of the visitors. This way, we link Elsa Núñez’s anthology with our contemporaneity. Each area offers several materials: the artist’s voice providing anecdotes about her creations and about her life, additional audiovisual materials, links to other pieces from Centro León’s Collection, and questions that trigger reflection. In the exhibition room, each area has a digital tablet dedicated to the mediation program, which is also included in the virtual tour of our exhibition and on our website. The public program designed for the exhibition promotes the contact of different social and cultural actors, at the same time that it fosters moments for playful learning and connection based on the references offered by the exhibition. The work of our artist has crossed ages, and in each one, she has left her stamp, that of her absolute being. She has devised a variety of expression forms, and in all of them, Elsa’s perfume prevails. Reconstructing in each painting a version of each one of us, rising and elevating that universality that we all carry within. Elsa has been each one of us, and we have all been Elsa’s paintings at some time: in our feelings, in our emotions, in our dances or abstractions. She is the spirit of transformation and survival of the human being. She is the firm determination of ethics
