Tempus fugit

“... Time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail", stated the Roman poet Virgil in his poem Georgics. Commonly found under the form of an inscription on clocks, it enhances our concerns about the fleetingness of time and the ravages thereby caused. This further evokes French author Marcel Proust´s work À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – “In Search of Lost Time” – whose theme is exactly the anguish and grief about time that has irretrievably gone.

This ungraspable quality of time, however, seems to be the source of inspiration to Isabel Pons Tello, a talented Catalan artist based in Barcelona, who admits to be “impressed by the poetry of time’s fleetingness, of the frozen moment” and to have always felt a strong connection to literary authors, who play an important role in her life and her artwork. Evidence of this is the choice of titles for some of her productions, such as “El Que Queda del Dia” (“The Remains of the Day”) or “The Flowers of Evil”.

Pons Tello’s deeply beautiful and poetic artistic creations seek the “poetics of what has been found, the fascinating dialogue which is produced by what is casual”, using rusty iron minerals and resins. Her unconventional and awesome art sets a dialogue among the different metal parts, fragments of the industrial society, which are crafted into specific contexts in which her work “evolves into an almost sculptural painting”.

Curiously enough, even Pons Tello’s choices make a statement of the artist’s objectives and concerns, since rusty metal materials are a palpable evidence of the passage of time, of the effects of nature on the materials: “Iron oxidises and goes through an alteration in its composition. It corrodes and a whole universe of different textures and remains emerge on its metallic surface”, says Pons Tello. And she further mentions that rusty iron evokes to her the paradox of our human lives: what allows us to live (oxygen) is exactly what can kill us.

Her stunning, unusual and unexpected artworks further reveal her interest in culture and mythology, which is also reflected in some titles for her creations, namely “El naixement de Venus” (“The Birth of Venus”), “El fil de la vida” (“The Thread of Life”), “Els sons del silenci” (“The Sounds of Silence”).

A particularly attractive aspect of Isabel Pons Tello’s artwork, which can be said to stand somewhere between painting and sculpture, is their intensely texturized feature and their deep, rich colour palette, which seem to challenge viewers to reach out and touch them to feel their innermost essence.

In Isabel Pons Tello’s creations just like in our lives, time is the field for sedimentation where our experiences and our vital erosions happen in a fleeting, irreversible way “while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail”.