TreeHouse (2021)
Wood, methacrylate and steel Carving, laser pyrography and paint140 x 15
0 x 120 cm / 30 x 100 x 20 cm / 19 x 33 cm
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2021.514.4
Pretérito imperfecto [Imperfect] (2021) is a project consisting of different techniques and processes – from laser pyrography and painting to sculpture – where the centrepiece is a replica of the shed that the artist built in his childhood with his brother and cousin, and now made with industrially treated wooden boards. That original structure was built from pieces recovered from an old mill and painted in red and green. Based on his memories and a few photographs, the artist has accurately reconstructed the treehouse, as a place to shelter, of memory and imagination, which are common motifs in Helí García’s work. Reproducing that precarious construction using industrial wood – new, polished and assembled with technological precision by means of a 3D scanner and CNC cutter – shifts the experience towards the field of art, underlining the tension between the natural and the artificial, the original and its copy. All the endeavour invested seeks, paradoxically, for the result to appear as imperfect.
The work is based on the idealization of childhood and the longing for stereotypical experiences, fed by American films of the 1980s and 1990s in which the tree house was as a setting for adventures, discovery and coming of age. Personal memory thus intersects with a broader sociological reading, where the cabin becomes a metaphor for childhood curiosity and the encounter with the unknown, sexuality or death.
‘It is here is a matter of staging not so much the cabin itself as its memory in the room; and the memory is always a simplification and a sublimation of experience: it is constructed in a different way; it demands its own work and requires a different treatment. Unlike the original construction, the replica is here an object of aesthetic contemplation, which cannot be touched; it resembles in this respect any memory, which at the same time brings to mind and separates from the original experience.’ (Jaime Cuenca: El árbol ausente. Text taken from the ‘Pretérito imperfecto’ publication, 2022).
The project reveals the constants of the artist’s career: a practice open to different media beyond painting, a work influenced by direct contact with the material and by a critical reflection on the role of the artist in society and in nature. With irony and lyricism, his discourse explores themes such as power, vanity, innocence and the passage of time, while interrogating the creative act itself understood as a substitute for the natural.
