At thirteen years old, Ana María Rueda (1954) was already training in painting and drawing at David Manzur’s studio. The interest in art, which had been nurtured by her grandfather Plutarco, an inventor by profession, bore fruit. At twenty-six, Rueda had already graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and had visited multiple museums and galleries across the European continent. Since then, nature has been the subject, motif, and medium in which she has found inspiration, making it the main resource of much of her production. It has been the guiding beacon of her work; through it she has approached what she considers “archetypal symbols” of the life cycle: water, earth, fire, and air — elements she has explored to establish through them metaphors of human dwelling, but also to invite the viewer to reflect on their role in society and the world. Water and earth were the first; later came Fire (1993), which serves as a sort of inaugural piece of that exploration. Although this screen print already reveals Rueda’s shift toward an abstraction marked by the symbolic and the indexical, it would be only the beginning of a series bearing the same name that would use pyrographed wood as a medium. In it she turns to chance, but also to the passage of events and the presence of the trace of that occurrence as an aesthetic exercise and artistic product.
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