Jacqueline Unanue: “The Eternal Return”
Muse Gallery
52 N 2nd St.
Philadelphia
Sept. 13, 2024
As a child in Chile, artist Jacqueline Unanue would look up from her grandmother’s kitchen table and land her eyes on a “big, mysterious map” of Basque Country, where her late grandfather had been born before he migrated to South America as a teenager.
On Friday afternoon, Unanue looked up at her own cartographic creations hung not on her grandparent’s walls, but inside Muse Gallery, a Philadelphia arts’ cooperative. Unanue’s paintings, which make up the gallery’s September show, “The Eternal Return,” are less literal than traditional maps, but make use of ubiquitous symbology to chart her personal path through the places and peoples that have defined her current existence.
Unanue was manning the desk of Muse when I stopped by in time for a spontaneous tour of that artwork by its author. The abstract, terracotta- and sepia-soaked landscapes look like they could be suspended inside a stone-heavy, postmodern home built out of the forest floor by taste-forward millionaires. But the pieces are actually stylized interpretations of Unanue’s own research into rock art — that is, artwork done directly on rock faces — inspired in part by her Basque roots.
The pieces on display meld the colors of the natural environment with existing symbolism as seen on rock artifacts documented in Chile and Basque and with “signs that arose spontaneously to me through ancient memory.”
Take, for example, an expansive triptych that serves as the show’s main centerpiece. The first piece focuses on Chilean iconography, which bleeds into the second canvas’ show of Basque symbolism, and then erupts with a magnetically turquoise finale fusing Unanue’s emotional understanding of the two different lands.
It’s hard to decipher the visual language of Unanue’s abstract landscapes given that I’ve traveled little outside of America’s great plains and cities. But there’s an obvious degree of universality posed by the pictures: Wobbling circles, tentative ladders and zig zagging lines conjure the presence of trees, mountains, waters, shelter and, however loaded it may sound, the full scope and chain of human life.
At the same time that Muse Gallery was opened in 1977, making it now one of the oldest artist co-ops in the city, Unanue was visiting Basque Country for the first time. She toured the Altamira caves, which were first shut down to the public that same year in an effort to protect the paleolithic sketches sealed on the stone walls inside.
But before its replica became a tourist destination, Unanue was able to see the 35,000-year-old art herself — a spiritually off-the-map experience that connected her not only to family stories passed on to her about her grandfather, but “to the really unique origin of humanity.”
“I’m not really sure about the meaning,” she said of the cave art. It’s evidently all speculative from a 21st century mindset. But she did notice how many symbols contained in that cave were similar to signs found in other parts of Europe and Africa around similar points in time.
Altimira is now closed to the public. Chile is perhaps one of the closest countries you can get to “off the grid.” But Unanue is content to continue creating in her third country of citizenship, the perhaps less scenically glorious but still historic city of Philadelphia, where she and her husband have lived for the last 20 years.
Though not born and raised here, she sounded as royal as the Prince of Bel-Air when she clarified: “I never say I’m from Philly. I say I am a West Philadelphian.”
As for where she’s going next — whether by plane, by pen or both — Unanue motioned to a small watercolor impression of a recent trip to the Poconos and said: “I think I’ll focus on the present.”
NEXT:
“The Eternal Return” is showing through Sept. 29 at Muse Gallery.
