...and there was time

Helga de Alvear (Kirn, Germany, 1936) was recognized in 2010 as one of the 100 most important and influential people in the world of art in the famous list "Power 100". In the same year she opened to the public the Visual Arts Center Foundation Helga de Alvear in Caceres, with the exhibition "Margins of silence", a selection of 115 works from the Helga de Alvear Collection.

The new prescriptions of mobility, speed and immediacy imposed by the forms of contemporary life and the new technologies have profoundly modified our perception and experience of time. Faced with the need to examine its representation, artists, situating themselves in an off time, a time apart from events, the media and the dominant here and now, have taken refuge in a conception of time as a construct of the self and in their poetic or political experimentation in order to reach a time redeemed through heterochrony.

Complex in its manifestations, elusive and even capricious when it comes to capturing it, time has become an open creation that is revealed as a structure without structure, as an integration of symbolic, emotional and political variables that allow it to show itself in its many folds, forks and densities and in all its dimensions: historical, social, individual and emotional. The result is a great plurality of forms of representation with echoes of the infinite perceptions of experienced, remembered or projected time, which find a similar diversity in the act of reading. The viewer is now the person in charge of reactivating the layers of time held within the image.

The works that make up this exhibition, directly or indirectly, literally, allegorically or metaphorically, have a temporal dimension, as their first objective or in the service of various conjectures and interests. All of them, as part of the Helga de Alvear Collection, have acquired a new sense of time, that of an abstract system by which the collector organizes the world, her world, and where they work as indexical marks of moments and experiences that link the time of Helga de Alvear to that of each work.

Photographs provided by the Visual Arts Center Foundation Helga de Alvear. © images: the authors.