Artists Lives. Looking and Writing in El nervio óptico of María Gainza

Abstract

El nervio óptico of María Gainza displays a series of procedures in which the gaze and its materiality —the fragment torn from the body to which the title of the text alludes— organize a narrative flow intertwining the history of art, the biography of artists and the autobiography from the author herself. Unlike what happens in other texts that recount the lives of artists, the eleven fragments that are linked in Gainza's novel start from the chance encounter of the narrator with works by painters of different origins, an encounter that activates a scriptural mechanism in which the mandatory aesthetic is relegated to the background compared to the exercise of the viewer's visual perception.