Ambar Labruna

Roberto De Espada

Art Critic - AICA, Uruguay
Artistic Patrimony Curator of the Ministry of Public Education
Director of the “Juan Zorilla de San Martin” Museum
Published in 1995

The interest in her pictorial history, which is precisely the culture of water colors, Ambar Labruna takes on a large quantity of seductions that water colors offer in which both tradition and the renovation impulse are bonded.  It will be equally interesting to study what there is behind her womanhood in the formation of her work; it’s a fact that the intrinsic characteristics of water colors have made her particularly cultivated in the female genre.

In front of Ambar Labruna’s amount of art, it is not impertinent to make a first approximation that in a sense emphasizes the singularities of her sex, which are shown in her work.

All this, which is alright, makes us question where is Ambar Labruna’s personality?  The answer is apparently simple:  in the security that her stains show that they do not seem touched so that a spontaneous effect reflects them; in the luminous festivity (true “joie-de-vivre” that Ambar recovers in her art work), in the strategic manner of obtaining that one single stain manages to define the net limits of a drawing fragment.

Ambar can’t hide that she is a pupil of who dominates all the water color strategies, Dante Picarelli, but this does not go against her as an artist, on the contrary it is a tool, as far as what she’s being seeing, according to the taught tradition.

Naturally, water color loves figures but nothing avoids that it can also be the means for a more subjective expression of whom does it and here is the critical point that determines if you are or in front of an artist or of a “good pupil”.  It is required to risk the qualitative jump forward that implies ceasing the persuasion of fear to naturalism or to deeply enter into the most complex worlds of a more abstract expression but more dearly to the personal world.

Ambar Labruna is in the progress of a full instrumentation of a new world where the proposal is radically different:  the realm of the pigments’ expressive fields is now no more subject to the rigorousness of a concrete drawing but to other rigidities instead: those which derive from an inwardness that pulses to gain expression and the artist’s ambition to grammatically structure what she feels is a world of inwardness that quivers in and behind her stains, stains that have already gained terrain from her previous stage.

What she has gained up to now in this so strengthening attempt for her as a person and as an artist as well as for the water color vocabulary is not little:  an outline of a complex world surges from her stains, sombre at times, where the light filters laboriously from within the darkness that extracts the subtlety that water color demands.

Ambar Labruna is in a clear and plain process of elaborating and processing a world whose first cautious observation promotes the water colors’ enrichment and will permit the enlargement of a new horizon as an artist.

EFE

Article realized by the international agency of news EFE and published on the 1st of July 2006 in the newspapers El Pais, El espectador.com and Montevideo.com

Uruguayan art in China

Today, the first exposition of modern art from Uruguay has been inaugurated in Shanghai.

The first exposition of modern art from Uruguay, was inaugurated today in the urban library of Shanghai, where a total amount of 26 creations from 19 Uruguayan painters of modern art, will be exposed at one of the most frequented culture centers of the Chinese metropolis.

“We show up with some very different offers, with a sample of pictures, which do not pretend to be a catalog, nor a resume, nor a selection of older pieces, but an actual creation” pointed Álvaro Cirillo, the chairman of this exposition, out, who is the executive director of the non-profit organisation Trazos Uy (Trace of Uy).

At least, together with the Uruguayan diplomacy this example shows up to be “a help for young Uruguayan artists to start their activity abroad, to support them to begin a little career,” explained another member of the Trazos Uy, Daniel Martinéz.

The exposition presenting an informal serial of easels in the library, simulates an landscape of what is going on right now in the art of Uruguay, one first impression”, underlined Cirillo, who emphasized how difficult it would be to choose a selection that represents all directions of his country.

For those reasons, Trazos Uy, who has already brought more than 30 artists to countries like United States, Canada, Spain or France, has selected recent artists who paint abstract or fictitious art. In this group there are great artists as Eduardo Marcos, as well as an arrangement of developing or coming up painters.

In-between of the participants one can find already more developed artists like Ambar Labruna, Gladys González, Daniel Castro, Mónica Mascolo, Ana María Sánchez, Ivonne Prenol, Jorge Pizzanelli, Marta Basoa, Manuel Cabezas, Martha Langona and Laura Spera.

Additionally to this group you can sum the acts of younger artists like Ignacio Chouhy, Fabián Mowszovicz, Vicky Barranguet, Jacky Urioste, Juan Pablo Cao, Mauro Arbiza and Gerardo Gaudino.

Drawing a conclusion of this one-week-lasting exposition, the creations will stay in Shanghai for at least one year with the intension to set new exposition in other Chinese provinces. An example may start in the gallery 1001, in the popular street Moganshan Lu in Shanghai, where a local home for modern art can be found.