Aroma Foliado

In the summer of 2005, I had the opportunity to see the work of North American visual artist Suzanne Bocanegra. I was especially intrigued by her work: All the Petals from Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Sense of Smell, 1618, 2002. As its title indicates, this work uses Jan Brueghel’s The Elder’s Sense of Smell as its source. In his painting, Brueghel presents us with a garden where a female figure is inhaling the fragrance of a large bouquet of flowers. Bocanegra captures the essence of the flowers through a series of painted petals; the number matching the number of visible petals on the Brueghel painting. Each one of the petals is tied with a black ribbon on white wall forming a floral map, with the final effect a series of textures of great expressive and visual force.

The interesting part of this work is the way in which an artist creates her work from the appropriation, interpretation or fragmentation of images of another artist to build new units, creating new languages in quite different environments.

Undertaking the writing of a piece to celebrate Mozart’s 250th anniversary called for some decisions to be made, one of them whether or not to incorporate fragments of the Mozart pieces. But what was important was to have thoughts about the intersection points of his music with mine. That was the reason I decided to write my piece in a format very similar to a rondo, in which the musical language could flow with lightness and absolute freedom. So I used some fragments of the Mozart String Quartet No. 21 in D Major K. 575; these fragments link the sections, which are my memory, time and personal musical history.

The process used by Bocanegra inspired me and I used it like a platform for the reinterpretation and redevelopment of another artist’s material, but it gains its own life in my music without losing its essence. The main aspect is not the musical origin in itself, but how the new composition incorporates, develops and acquires new meanings and aesthetic values.

Gabriela Ortiz