Perla Krauze is not only an artist; she is a sort of interpreter that seems to know the language of stones and plants.

Perla Krauze doesn’t deny that there are some affinities between her own work and that of Anselm Kiefer or Jannis Kounellis. At the same time, she doesn’t hesitate to say that her works goes beyond, -much beyond, one would say-, the mere formal aspects of a work of art. Does this mean that her own work implies some sort of social concern? Everything indicates that it would be inaccurate to assume it, even when having in mind an exhibition as Small landscapes from near and far at The Chimney, in New York where, besides having used materials found in the once industrial and working-class neighborhood of Bushwick, the artist brought with her stones and minerals coming from such secluded places as China and Turkey, as well as Europe and America, thus highlighting a sort of lithic diversity that could be compared, à la rigueur, with the migratory waves that have constituted this mythical city of the arts. Indeed, Krauze seems to walk in the opposite direction of those who would like art to necessarily display a “social content”, despite the interest she has shown for humanity, at least as a phenomenon susceptible of being studied. 

It should be said that Krauze’s formation as an artist is atypical: in her beginnings, after having completed some semesters of a B.A. in anthropology, she finally decided to study graphic design at the ENAP (Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas-National School of Arts); she then pursued a certificate in textiles, in London and ended by earning a master’s degree at the Chelsea College of Art. If enumerating the steps of such a formative background could seem anecdotical, it reveals, in fact, an urge to find and follow new paths, far apart from those of artistic creation in Mexico at the time. It is perhaps for this reason that it is so difficult to compare her work to that of the Mexican artists of her generation, even if there is in Krauze some tendency to create sculptural compositions that remind us of the two dimensions of abstract painting, which, occasionally, may even evoke the work of Tàpies. 

Such a sinuous path announced a life given to exploration, -with all the uncertainties that this implies-, in a world that has always valued the solidity of regularity over any type of risk that could bring a new meaning to existence: in many ways, it is comparable to the cracks that form accidently in the sidewalks and which the artist likes to observe and highlight before offering them to the contemplation of the gazer. Such a path could appear to have as little solidity as that which, covering the floor of her studio, has been made of loose flagstones over which the artist now walks as if on the notes of a very old instrument, that could reproduce the primordial sounds of the universe. However, in this mineral pathway, every flagstone has found its place as a result of an investigation comparable to that which allows the archaeologists to restore ancient buildings as if completing a puzzle, even if the intention here is different for, paradoxically, the installation clearly defies the principle of stability, independently of the fact that, in other of her works, the artist has shown her affinity for architecture. 

Be that as it may, it is, in fact, in this sort of archaeological investigation that one may found the true key to understand the process of this artist who lets herself being found by the minerals that she uses in her work, occasionally bringing them to dialogue with plants or textiles, as if her intention was to visually recreate the natural histories of Antiquity and the Renaissance: those of Pliny, Aldrovandi, Bernard Palissy or Ferrante Imperato. Without any doubt, it is not by chance that, when contemplating Krauze’s installations, one remembers almost automatically the spirit of European Mannerism and, in particular, those Kunstkammern about which Schlosser wrote in his famous book Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance. Indeed, by seeing the exhibition of minerals and varied materials that the artist organizes in her studio as well as in museums and galleries, one is transported to those cabinets of curiosities of the 16th century where potentates as Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol or Rudolf II of Prague displayed for a few privileged ones, different “marvels” among which could be found corals, fossils and precious stones brought from regions as secluded as those that the artists is interested in. It should be clear that this is not an imitative exercise, but the result of a genuine investigation: it is only a posteriori that the artist has discovered the affinities between her work and such a significative period of the history of art, when this type of private collections where born, thus becoming the predecessors of our museums and, consequently, of archaeology. 

If the work of Krauze is, without any doubt, of an artistic nature, we could almost speak of the concretion of a destiny. It would seem that there is a correspondence between the actions of contemplating, seeking, finding, interrogating, collecting and organizing the minerals and various vestiges that Krauze tracks in nature, mainly in the mineral kingdom although also in that of the plants, and what these same actions could mean if they were directed toward the exploration of the psyche. It is a quest in which the minerals and their temporal traces allow a sort of archaeology of the soul, whose object of study wouldn’t be limited to the narrow realm of the individual unconscious but would encompass the deepest layers of the collective unconscious, where the interaction of nature and spirit is still recognizable. Perla Krauze is not only an artist; she is a sort of interpreter that seems to know the language of stones and plants. Sometimes she transfers this language to the canvass as the amanuensis monks would transfer the word of God to the parchment, as if to leave a trace of its meaning, although, here, the eternity of the stone transits to the realm of the perishable, by becoming a sort of textile motif in which predominate fabric lines which appear as mysterious as they are aesthetic. Of course, despite the undeniable contemporary character of Krauze’s work, one naturally thinks of those mystical treaties as Jakob Böhme’s Signatura rerum, whose purpose is to reveal the strange correspondences that exist between the shapes of nature and the divine, as Signatures of all things. 

It is possible that the artist doesn’t give too much importance to literature when thinking of her creative process. However, when understanding the way in which she relates with minerals, paths, and signs, it is almost impossible not to remember Novalis, the highest Romantic poet, as well as a mining engineer, which is quite meaningful in this context. Suffice it to recall the first lines of The disciples at Sais, which illustrate so easily Krauze’s concerns, in particular as they manifested during her artistic residence in Banff: 

Men travel by many different paths. Whoever tracks and compares their ways will see wonderful figures arising ; figures that seem to belong to the great Manuscript of Design which we decry everywhere, on wings of birds, on the shells of eggs, in clouds, in snow, in crystals, in rock formations, in frozen water, within and upon mountains, in plants, in beasts, in men, in the light of day, in slabs of pitch and glass when they are jarred and struck, in fillings around a magnet and in the singular Coincidences of Chance.

Not only Krauze has known how to find the minerals that she later displays by obeying to an aesthetical order whose key she is the only owner, but she has investigated how to recreate them synthetically, as the alchemists wanted to imitate in their flasks the work of nature. Thus, she has generated artificial objects that recall precious stones with their translucid and magnificent colors, although of such big sizes, that, if they were real, they could only be found in the palaces of an imaginary East. Among those gems created by artifice, those of a blue color seem to occupy a particularly significant position for the artist, a fact which is meaningful if one remembers how important for Renaissance and Baroque artists was lapis lazuli, a stone whose color resonate with that of the firmament. Due to its rarity and high value, it was used to prepare the only pigment worthy enough of being used to depict the Virgin’s mantle. Who would doubt that, in Mexico, the Virgin is also Mother Earth, of whom the minerals were born; as a proof of it: the folds of her skirt, which are still visible in the petrified lava of the Pedregal. It is in this extraordinary place in the south of Mexico City that the artist lived in her youth. It is a stony landscape, an imperishable witness of the Xitle’s eruption more than a thousand five hundred years ago, that probably left its imprint in the soul of the young Perla, whose name, in retrospective, seems to have been premonitory of the artistic quest to which she gave herself along her life’s path.