Ada Pérez García is presented as a materialist painter and therefore, if we do not misinterpret her, we understand that her paintings, conceived by her as stromas, as configurations of the visible world that are interwoven concealing other realities that remain on the back, are representations that they try to crunch critically a series of situations in which ethical, moral and political ideas are knotted that become practical models of our ideological present.

The painting The Indigenous is part of the series that completes the Andrés López de Medrano exhibition: image, time and reality, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the publication of his work, Logical Treaty or Elements of Modern Philosophy for the use of the Dominican youth. It has not been conceived, therefore, as an exempt table, but has been designed to concatenate with others: Medrano Time-Life, The Press in the Enlightenment of the nineteenth century, Spain overseas, The peninsular Spain, Between the scholasticism and sensualism and Bio-cartography of Andrés López de Medrano. From the place he occupies in the set we appreciate how Hispanic America, in which the map-portrait of Medrano is resolved, turns towards its pre-Columbian ancestors.

The image of the native, surely adorned for a tribal ceremony, which we guess configured by the primitive signs and the abstract spots that harmoniously combine blue and yellow, could very well evoke, outside the stromatic context in which it is inscribed, the nostalgia for a disappeared culture. From the assumptions of cultural relativism, which does not forgive Spaniards for having truncated indigenous cultures in their time of youthful apogee, the native man who intuited us would be a symbol to claim as an indigenous consciousness that sees the conquerors as mere predators and genociders.

But Ada Pérez does not want to fall into this machination that considers the historical significance of Discovery and Conquest from the only point of view of a subjective moral attentive only to the psychological aspects, which more than five centuries away is but a proceed ridiculous. The appreciation of the historical significance of that period can only take place at the level of an objective historical culture. And that's where the representative stroma of Ada Pérez seems to want to place us.

Indeed, the first thing that draws attention in the strokes and signs of the composition is that they appear disintegrated, as if to be a metaphor for the lack of internal unity of those indigenous peoples who speak different languages, worshiping different gods, having different customs and political manners could not, in any way, have reciprocal communication from one another. It is by means of the Spanish conquest, latent in the other paintings of the tapestry that form the complete work dedicated to Medrano, that the beginnings of a linguistic, juridical, and religious unity begin to take shape. And so the pictorial discourse of Ada Pérez, critic against those who insist today on keeping the tribal institutions intact, wants to emphasize, from a historical distance, how the actions undertaken by the Spaniards led, over time, to a cultural unit compatible with the genetic mixture propagated throughout Hispanic America and firmly consolidated institutionally in Medrano's time. Since the second half of the eighteenth century in the main cities of Spanish America were established agencies such as the Economic Societies of Friends of the Country, which, like the Church and the Universities, contributed to strengthen that common cultural unity that had already begun to take shape . For that reason, what the "indigenous" of Ada Pérez represents is nothing else than the very reverse that we do not see, that is, the social and cultural unity of Hispanic America that has to be put into the very process of establishing relations between the parts of America that have mediated through Spain. The notion of Hispanidad, which has so many negative adherences today, could be claimed precisely on the basis of those relations, which through Spanish as a common language continue to have full force today.


Carmen Baños Pino, doctor in Philosophy from the University of Oviedo.
Gijón, 29 of September of 2017