Mabel Poblet is dangerously tender. Her notion of painting is precious and her plastic gesture flirts in every occasion, in every piece, with the image as surface, life experience and index of reality. The high definition of her work is installed on what is sensorial more than visual. It sustains itself in the jabber that pends in the cold and crystalline dermis –depending on the material used in each case– of her icons.
Without any doubt in her hands the long technical tradition of painting acquires another dimension. That way her creative impulses unfold amongst pop, neorealist and skeptical. Some may object that in her so peculiar ideo-esthetic universe it is detected –exceedingly– the effluvia of self-reference. Which leads us by effect of rhetorical courses of action to the stability of the speech about femininity. It is true that the performance of the genre is vast in so disproportionate kindness. But more than a tribune to snatch truths away from the faint reason, it works to the inside of her representations like a significant and inviolable step of a process of self-definition, that it does not try already to procure in the vaults of the grandiloquent spark of the national identity, but on the contrary, it is index of a valid process of introspection and imaginary lucubration.
That way, as if the quality of death of her images held an organic auto-downgrading sense –imperceptible for the promptness of the brimming superficiality that protects it– fed little butterflies, she nourishes savages and jolly plastic flowers, jells, reflections, footlights. They say that postmodernism, in its pleiad of images enunciate the fateful sign of a disease; that the priggish luminosity of this wakes is not pretending to conceal the white and black belonging to the photographic developing, the presumed oversaturation of the record, the asphyxia of the alert look, the own discouragement and the someone else’s. And in it, melts down the glory of her perspectives: in the total poetical nudity before consternation and skepticism.
We can affirm, without fear to make a mistake of pride, that Mabel Poblet is our Warhol. Even though we do not talk about objects of consumption anymore, unmovable pieces, aftereffects of the body, complements, in short, of the human existence, in her work they are inviolable, and represented with a similar sense that Andy bestows to the cans of soup, soaps and shoes; the human body, its erotic structures, extremities and the niches of pleasure, its bristly bark, its placidity –between acrylic and opal– and its vibrations. It is an attempt of reflection on humanity, the meat that contains it and the primness of pleasure. But, we should mark off, she treats them with total nobility, with a kindness that eliminates every perturbing sensation. So her poetics sustains itself in a different notion of eros: abstract, intellective, mathematical, if you will.
That is why her entire work can be understood like effluvia of a pristine and undermined pleasure, since in it the haste before the need of satiate appetites has been surpassed by the aftertaste and the suspension of impulses, of the senses; of the faltering moderate earthquake of the bristly skin; of the palpitation. Hedonism in the summit of postmodernism. Hedonism instead of humanity.