Azul – María Edwards

The Lightness of the Void
/ by Héctor Soto

María Edwards’s art is suspended in the weightlessness of space and the persistence of time.
Her works, which are light and seemingly fragile, refer to lines that connect distant points and draw what appears to be the universal fabric of the firmament and the inscribed mystery of celestial bodies. Since there, in outer space, there is an order, regularities, alternations, and luminosities that astronomy has tried to explain since the dawn of time, it is not surprising that both faith and science have sought explanations in these phenomena not only to understand how the universe works but also under what codes life operates. If, as pre-Socratic philosophy suspected, it is true that things up above happen in an orderly manner, there would be no reason why things down here should not respond to the same legality.
The problem is that this logic is not revealed immediately. You have to go out and find it through recurrent and incessant searches.

As a visual artist, María Edwards works on the experience of contemplation. Hers is a gaze
that transcends both the crowd and contingency. Only from isolation and from the
majesty of open and immeasurable spaces, which are in the astral vault but also in the
sunsets of the northern Chilean desert, can her art formulate the locations she proposes. In
this, it is not much different from what astronomers do: observe and measure, project and calculate. Except that
she is not guided by telescopes or space observatories. She is guided by intuition and the resolute confidence
that the celestial order has, or could have, or should have, a correlation here below, based on
a statute that could be unraveled by interrogating the line, pendulum movements, music,
science, or mathematics.