“Deterrence. The tide and the limit” by Rosell Meseguer

Written by Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta

Rosell Meseguer is characterized by her intense and wide-ranging research in scientific, historical, poetic, magical and artistic fields, with lines of analysis that are treated as autonomous projects but with clearly evident links among them. A network of networks, a meta-text full of images, relationships and revelations, a map of searches and findings, which is in permanent growth, revision and expansion. In Deterrence. The tide and the limit, an extension of one of her longest explorations which began in 1999 with Battery of ashes. Methodology of Defense, Meseguer continues her taxonomic, conceptual and spiritual study of the numerous defensive, camouflage, refuge, attack and border architectures that are located in different sites on the Mediterranean coast. Multiple elements that she depicts as symbols of diverse forces: as positions that refer to totalitarianism, to the military protection of a nation, a context or a culture, but which also represent powerful vectors that connect with the reactive movements of resistance and opposition.

The return to the cave is one of the options that remain for us to survive this convulsive contemporaneity, a primitive process of protection, concealment, fortification and bunkerization, which we have never stopped relying on despite its successive and heterogeneous renovations. In Deterrence. The tide and the limit, the architectural devices linked to control and repression, to structures of safeguarding and counterattack, along with the elements that refer to the fort, the wall, the tower and the bunker, are analyzed to create artworks that speak about the void, about the hermetic nature of power and its distance from the people, but they also appeal to beauty, unreality as well as the suicidal and romantic defense of any ideal. Structures that serve to outline the struggle that culture, art and creation have as active protagonists, as backbones of this resistant conspiracy that is generated by thought, experience, ethics and aesthetics, while a beautiful and disturbing metaphor is elaborated around the limit, refuge, attack and defense.

Meseguer examines, deconstructs and reformulates these real, physical, protective and resistance representations, which not only focus on the figure of the combatant and soldier, but also the migrant, the rebel and the revolutionary agent. A trench that symbolizes the confrontation between power and counter-power, from which some of the most accurate analyses of our contemporaneity arise: which specifically refer to the unique archaeology that is established on these defense and control elements, treated as symbols of complex and timely concepts such as waiting, surveillance, border, survival, protection or prison. Recontextualized and rethought, these devices reveal the rigidity and impregnability as well as the inaccessibility and impenetrability of the system, structures and superstructures comprised by units that are undoubtedly one of the most disturbing icons of different countries that have been established, as monuments with an ever-changing meaning, in the gray area of our time.

BIOGRAPHY

Rosell Meseguer – Orihuela / Cartagena, 1976 – www.rosellmeseguer.com

Visual artist with a PhD in Fine Arts from Complutense University of Madrid, where she is a professor. She has been awarded a scholarship by the Academy of Spain in Rome, the Botín Scholarship or the Fundació Miró Mallorca. She has been invited by institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and Sports, Spain; AC/E, Acción Cultural España; Manifesta, International Foundation Manifesta, Netherlands; Plat(t)Form, Winthertur, Zurich; Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage, Chile; or the ArtCenter / South Florida, Miami. Her artwork can be found in collections such as the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; AENA Foundation; Royal Academy of Spain in Rome; UNICAJA, Málaga or IVAM, Valencia; as well as in private collections in the USA (Board Whitney Museum, New York), Latin America (MAC Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago de Chile) and Spain (Seguros DKV).

Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta – Córdoba, 1976 – www.curatoria.org

Art critic, exhibition curator, researcher and teacher. He has a degree in Art History from UIB and a Law degree from UB. He is President of the Association of Critics and Curators of the Balearic Islands; he was also President of the Institute of Contemporary Art in that autonomous community. He belongs to the Ministry of Truth in the Sublime magazine and writes articles for ABC Cultural supplement. He has been Director of the PalmaPhoto photography festival. He has curated exhibitions in Germany, Austria, Spain, Finland, Holland, England, Mexico and the Czech Republic.