La cuestión plástica en las ilustraciones de Rosana Faría en la literatura infantil

Abstract

In her article La ilustración en la literatura infantil [The illustration in children’s literature], a researcher, Ainara Erro, suggests that “illustrations can be evaluated from different perspectives, since pictorial trends of different periods, thought lines, theories of knowledge, etc. have been reflected in multiple illustrations in children’s books.” Thus painting and/or artistic experience perceived in the context of children’s literature involves not only the method of preparation connected with it or pictorial forms that it is inclined to. It also transforms into a textual body, through which certain accumulations, condensations (according to Todorov) and aesthetic profiles are manifested and created. In children’s literature, games that may be introduced through plastic art are becoming increasingly popular. In Rosana Faría’s works, they constitute a double “correlated” element. A written text is not only a signifier, but it is transferred to another dimension filled with expression forms, thanks to using the language as “extrapolation” of the visual and for the visual. Pictorial art appears to be associated with not only what we see. For Faría, seeing color is not just a fact reflected in the onlooker’s eye, and an artistic text does not contain one and the only form of transcending a western tendency of thinking, according to which painting exists only when it is seen. Thus, we may wonder how to paint colors as if we were blind, playing with other senses, tastes, smells, sounds or emotions. How to illustrate for those who cannot see, and bring those who can see to the world of the blind through images, or vice versa? How to discover colors without seeing them, using only a black color, how to make it unequivocal? Eventually, how can we feel and perceive the world around us through a tactile image that would be related to the nature? We will try to answer these questions through convex illustrations created by Venezuelan artist, Rosana Faría, in a book by Menena Cottin El libro negro de los colores [The Black Book of Colors]. It is interesting how a well-known illustrator has found an appropriate style, an appropriate visual language for this poetic work, how she has defined colors through other senses, and how she has met the challenge of illustrating colors without their plastic presence.