Inside the Murmur
By Rebeca Barquera‍

There is a sensation experienced in cities: walking in solitude within the multitude. We pivot to avoid brushing against someone. It is forbidden to touch each other and yet inevitably there is contact. A una palma de distancia (A Hand’s Breadth Away) is an invitation from the visual artist Hilda Palafox to make painting into a connection. Every one of the pieces in this show reflects non-tactile contact, absences, dodging from being brushed up against, and distance between bodies that, at the same time, would seem to be united, like the bodies that roam through cities without interacting, seeking each other without knowing it.

Contact is the primary focus of Hilda’s vision. Her work leads us to question our everyday lives, from the first exchange of the morning to the longed-for caress of a hand that we know will not come back. And beyond that touch, the imperturbable faces of the figures are situated in the instant of doubt, in the uncertainty before a shared story gets underway. Spaces of possibility are shaped starting from that moment of estrangement. Up close, from far away, from within, or starting from the search for consonances, these works present the complexity of the encounter with the other.

Since the Age of Enlightenment, it has been said that painting is mute and is based on simultaneity whereas poetry is succession, movement, time. In Hilda’s paintings, however, it is possible to observe the reverberations that get dragged between the figures, a deaf polyphony, a murmur that circulates and moves us. We listen with our bodies. This painting is both multiform and a follower of the path of that murmur.

“Each sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It has a totally private interior yet its trajectory is public,” the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson reminds us. The undefined places where the actions depicted in the paintings occur make it so that any space of intimacy, of inner reflection, can become public space—a space where sociability is both produced and avoided. It must be said that in the case of Hilda’s painting, the women represented on the canvases “have no doors on their mouths,” as would have been said in antiquity about the nymph Echo. Carson rightly notes that that door might be patriarchal culture’s most important project: a tactic for associating feminine sound with monstrosity that is visible in the mythological representation of women as Sirens, Furies, and Gorgons. Therefore, if culture is based on the articulation of phonemes, of communicating in accordance with a structure of sound, we could, from a feminist position, reclaim the disordered murmur, the free exchange of pulsations between bodies, of palpitations that get shared when we walk, when we appropriate every room.

In this way, A una palma de distancia constructs situations that question the human condition, asking about belonging to a group, like a family, certain communities, or different social movements in a world ruled by technology. Starting from an attention to detail, to the care and meticulousness of the connections, the longed-for link is constructed. It goes from the bodily knot to sisterhood, from meeting to correspondence.

In the end, it is clear why painting is the path the artist chose for establishing contact with us. Her work with oil—out of respect for the time it takes, following the flowing and drying of the material on the canvas—is her language, her murmur. Taking slowness and attentive care as part of the creative process is her way of taking a position against the immediacy and rhythm of the accelerated, machine-driven life imposed on us by capital. It is about returning to humanness, apprehending the Other carefully so as to crack open ordinariness, routine… and get closer to one another.

It is about conceiving painting as a living organism that depends on other bodies, on other beings, with whom it crosses a city and is, at the same time, part of it. It is a reflection starting from which we should conceive life today: in relationship.