Texts
Exhibitions
RAMOS YZQUIERDO, Marta - Reflejar la casi nada / Luis Adelantado Gallery / December 2023
A reflection that crosses (Continued)... As if it were a material translation of a ray of light, it marks a trajectory, a connection that offers a new exit, an opening to the folding and unfolding of the room. Everything on the diagonal created by a thread in tension that reflects the light and orients us to sharpen our perception of what is in continuous mutability [Anna Talens, Fuga II, 2023].
From twelve twenty-six to twelve forty-nine It depends on how far or how little we move away from the magical day of the solstice. In that interval, the light draws the movement of the earth.
[Anna Talens, Alba Mobile, Valencia, 2023].
Read on
SÁNCHEZ, Suset - Indexar el paisaje / Artcronica / July 2023
Anna Talens "works with the matter, with the organic, with life and with the relationship we have with nature, its rhythm, its forms and with the ephemeral". Something that is expressed as a subtle metaphor in the imposing installation Red de Niebla. Beauty and terror, encapsulated landscape, caged nature, captive life, zoos-cemeteries, ecosystems packaged and distributed in the cruel networks of intercontinental traffic. Exportable life and nature, are transformed into consumer objects and ethnographic fetishes in a global network where it is increasingly difficult to observe a landscape without the veil of artifice of the entertainment and tourism industry.
Read on
Press
NARRO, Itziar - Best of España. Las instalaciones de arte y belleza de Anna Talens / AD Magazine Spain / April 2020
“Among her obsessions are fragility, touch, eternity, decadence, emotion, fabrics, things that shine, colors, details, and the insignificant. "I am interested in spirituality without religion and I appeal to intuition as a potent part of our intelligence," she says”.
Read on
PEIRÓ, Juan Bautista - Anna Talens. Tiempos de Oro / Levante - Posdata / October 2017
“A lover of the origins of things, of the ultimate nature of things, of the essential charge of materials reduced to pure lines, Talens tackles with sensitivity and maturity different proposals in which he delicately integrates historical time with his lived experience, constructing with both his particular and hopeful vision of the future”.
MELIS, Ilenia Maria - Nuove generazioni d’arte. Al Macro di Roma. L’ arte e la perfettibilità / Artribune / December 2015
“Fragments of life are condensed in the works of Anna Talens, an artist who actively continues to refine her skill by perfecting it in each of her works, to go further and further to arouse sensory emotions. Poor art is refined and reworked; attractive materials such as bird feathers, gold leaves, textiles, and sheets of paper, acquire new identities, and ambiguous images that tell existential concepts. Treasures to be preserved, nourished, nurtured, a mirror of today's reality and of that attempt to preserve culture by placing it among the primary goods, capable of generating a change that has the human subject at its center”.
RAMALLO, Francisco - Beauty and decay - Doze Magazine / March 2014
“In Beauty and Decay, as the artist has stated about her creative process, she once again makes use of her "intuition, feeling, intellect and emotion", to enter a field in which only Talens and other "poets" know how to settle: to make the object, by using the space as such, a mystical, melancholic and surreal experience in order - following Dubán Urbina - "to take us into a dream space. ...in an interior that is flooded by a series of juxtaposed images, which have a structure, but whose meaning only emerges through a subsequent operation of free association". As in Max Ernst's collages, when decadence is beautiful, it produces dreams”.
Read on
PÉREZ, Luis Francisco - Anna Talens. Mar de fondo - Arte Contexto / May 2013
“Every object that describes itself as "artistic" colonizes and makes its own a certain idea of the "poetic", but very few of these objects possess the aristocratic quality of knowing themselves to be bearers of a "Poetry" which, beyond its formal successes or misfortunes, it is only through this dazzling of the spirit that the object manages to become a formal and metaphor of the object of the very idea of Poetry. From this necessary prologue, we can begin a theoretical analysis of Anna Talens' work”.
MADERUELO, Javier. - Anna Talens. Las aguas del subconsciente - Babelia, El País / April 2013
“Since symbolism, at the end of the 19th century, poets and artists have been making excursions into this particular world. Mallarmé opened a door through which poets, painters, and musicians, but also scientists, like Freud, or philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, have entered. It is not necessary to be a surrealist to be an archaeologist of the inner world, it is enough to have the sensitivity and the will to accept to immerse oneself in introspection. These are some of the qualities of Anna Talens, an artist interested in nature, in the phenomena that spontaneously and randomly arise without human intervention”.
BRAZA, Alba. Imago - Ex nihilo nihil fit Catalogue. UMH Elche. 2023
“The delicacy shown in her work hides a close emotional and ethical involvement with her surroundings a large part of her career is based on the production of site-specific projects in various cities, interventions that end up being the conceptual basis of works conceived for the gallery. When Talens intervenes in the space, she treats the place as though it were an inhabited canvas from which she wishes to bring out its History to project questions related to memory that arise from her cultural baggage and personal intuition”.
Read on
ALBELDA, José. - Materia. Madre del mundo - Mi pequeño mundo Cataloge. Art Visual 2002-2003.
“... are pieces, verses of the complex poem of that which we call nature, the free staging of an eternally mobile diversity, in which matter is shown to us as an offering. If any form can be engendered from mud and water, a new identity can also be created from the unraveling of the order of the world. The fragments, the minimal details of other lives, of other bodies or landscapes, claim the right to be the protagonists of their history”
ROBLEDO PALOP, José. Roomart Exhibition. UPV. 2011.
“These works made of paper remind us of the possibility proclaimed by Jerzy Grotowski in Towards a Poor Theatre, that the theatrical work - the operation of recreating meaning and existence - can exist without costumes, without music, without voices, without text[…] As spectators of a society mediated by the strategies of the spectacle, we are educated in the sublime and not in silence and weightlessness. The materials of Anna Talens' works, in this case paper, propose an alternative gaze to grandiloquence, they are a happy effort in the face of the drama of the pathetic. They are, in short, a praise of the fragile”.
PÉREZ, Isabel. - La importancia de lo nimio - Catalogue “Puntas de flecha. Nuevas trayectorias en el arte contemporáneo valenciano” Las Atarazanas, Valencia / 2010
“Art is very much autobiographical. Throughout history there has been no shortage of obvious examples, especially bearing in mind that creation allows us to put down on paper many of the feelings we feel, the experiences we suffer or, fortunately, enjoy, the historical events we live through. In the case of our protagonist, each work reflects the optimism with which she lives everything, the joy with which she takes each moment of her life, and the meticulous observation of the small elements that surround her. Whatever is in sight, however trivial and unimportant it may seem, in Anna's hands it becomes something exquisitely charming”.
OPITZ, Silke. - Desde el Mediterráneo, con escamas de seda - Kunstverein Kreis Ludwigsburg e. V. Germany / 2009.
“As Talens' works are far from fashionable, they are unknown in the "scene". This may be mainly because they are so beautiful. The artist harks back to the old ideal - which is discussed in today's art business - and which is almost always associated with the human body, often the female one. Yet Talens sees herself primarily as a sculptor and refers to beauty more as an abstract aesthetic quantity that she seeks and finds, mainly in lifeless nature”.
PÉREZ PONT, José Luis. - Leve - “Leve” Cataloge. PazYComedias Gallery. Encuentro entre dos Mares, Bienal São Paulo - Valencia. 2007.
“From her personal and creative freedom, she allows herself, even though she is aware of the contrary force of certain cultural currents and perhaps precisely because of this, to choose to direct us through her work towards an angle that is an equal part of the scene that makes up the everyday. In this individual search as part of the collective evolution is contained the uncertainty of the human, resolved with certainty in the words of the poet Walt Whitman: "All truths wait in all things".
Interviews
AUTODEFINIDES #123. Afán de Plan. Anna Talens. 2022.
“In your work, we are particularly attracted by the authenticity and the testimonial value that comes from the physical presence of the objects you use. How do you look for them and find them? How important is this part of the process in your work?
They are part of our life and each person has his or her personal object iconography. I believe that in addition to art, a very human thing is the creation of objects. The relationship between the body and the object is inseparable. They help us drink, protect us from the cold, eat, and even remember and be venerated in shops and museums. My attraction to objects is one of love, of impact, for their color, their shape, and, above all, their materiality and their provenance, which I always investigate to find hidden messages”.
Read on
MAKMA. Gras, Irene. Anna Talens: elegance, softness, and delicacy. December. 2013.
“Where does your work come from?
My work starts, in terms of historical artistic contextualization, from the found object, from 'Arte Povera', but more refined, more transformed. I call it "organic minimalism", a practice that is linked to the language of some Brazilian artists, where the found or manufactured object is organized geometrically and rationally, almost on the borderline between order and the arbitrary. Moreover, I like contradiction, so my objects are antagonistic, and enjoy a double quality, being free and fragile”.
Read on
ATTITUDE. Interior Design N. 43, Artist with Attitude: 01. Detail and Delicacy. Jan/Feb 2012.
“What’s your definition of art?
For me, art is a language, a way of saying: I’m here, I think, live, and want to speak. I see it as a reduplication of what already exists.
And of beauty?
For me, beauty isn’t perfection, the canon, and isn’t connected to elitism. The beauty I make use of is more closely related to the spirit. It’s an attitude to things when our eyes make an effort to see from the point of view of happiness a beauty that, as Susan Sonntag said in her 'Argument about Beauty', “Beauty is part of the history of idealizing, which is itself part of the history of consolation”.
DOS DOCE. Saldaña, Iñaki. 30-6-2011
“You take materials and give them a function quite different from their own. Feathers that form hearts, pins that are soft to the touch... What do you prefer, to surprise or to be surprised?
My work is nourished by idealization, by how I see the world, by how I try to idealize every day to construct my happiness without any great artifice. Provoking visual poetry, playing at decontextualizing the object, or finding different uses for the materials is a very amusing process, even with humor. I often don't know where the relationships I make between objects or between materials come from, they are perhaps the result of a physical and mental game in which things abandon their fate to live a second life as works of art”.
Read on