This exhibition on the graphic work of Nicole Florensa (Paris, 1926 – 2012) takes as its starting point a previous review presented at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando (Madrid) in 2008, curated by Antonio Bonet Correa under the title El Amor al Arte and is part of the Nicole Florensa and her Time project, which covers the Golden Years of the personal and artistic life of the Fenosa family.

Engravings, watercolours, photographs and painting are the tools with which Nicole Florensa synthesises the surrounding present. Part of this production are her pieces on paper in small formats and short runs, showing her skill in such difficult techniques as burin and black mode.

In her works, in general, this small format, which implies a small workshop or intermittent travel, allows her to control the processes in which the choice of technique encourages research into the hidden layers of the images. In her, the outside is the inside. Her exploratory vision is based on the desire to capture and interpret the outside world from a way of life based on freedom, simple gestures and a keen eye that transcends forms and scales. By focusing on the detail or extracting the part from the whole, she manages to turn these parcels of moments into protagonists.

Nicole is very interested in Taoist philosophy in the way of understanding the universe and spirituality, and perhaps her way of capturing materiality also alludes directly to Heidegger’s idea that “reality cannot be understood primarily from the corporality of what is perceived.”

Fleeing from the academic tradition and influenced by Japanese painters and engravers, she aims at the domestic or the landscape, combining biomorphic forms with found objects. These are scenes of interiors and exteriors in which, rather than alluding to a representation of the world, she points to a conception of time.

Her first engravings with burin date from 1962 and allow us to recognise her mastery of the technique in detail. Since 1970 Nicole has become a virtuoso of the black manner technique, which allows the whites of the print to be obtained from a total black.

The exhibition is completed with documentary material photographed and recorded by Nicole. In addition, in the studio of El Vendrell, her refuge of isolation in the upper part of the medieval tower of the palace, Nicole was captured in the process of preparing her engravings by the journalist Patience Gray.

Curated by Nekane Aramburu