There is a repeated presence of certain icons in Pilar Cossio’s work. The rhinoceros, shoes, planes, cities…. Icons which refer to the historic avant-gardes of the twentieth century: Sironi, Podsadecki, Kollar; or the great Durero to start with. Besides The same figure frequently reappears in different works, as though that chosen image, within the possible wide range, is elevated to the generic category, which would itself indicate that the authoress is, above all, interested in the semantic value, or even better, the meaning reached after the change into a metaphoric image.
The rhinoceros, in this radically contemporary field represents an inserto which, however is immediately integrated in virtue of it’s own meaning: the continuous breakthrough.. In fact, behind the superimpositions of images that usually make up the works the impression of movement, of permanent change is suggested. In that sense the pointed shoes, like the sharp rhinoceros’s horns and the aerodynamic endings of aeroplanes reiterate that meaning.
The formal strategy: that kind of clean collages, which by means of slides end up by imposing an ordered complexity, are similar to utopian visions of urban architects throughout the last century. But whereas those who imagined them as impossible alternatives to urban chaos, as fantasies which could never become materialised, those of Pilar Cossio embody evidence of the present; her very cosmopolitanism, her physical moving from one place to another, which is also mental moving around, searching into sensitivity and memory and her own personal experience.
The discreet magnitude of each one of the works remains totally compensated by the accelerated rhythm of the images contained. They are small flashes, momentary sparkles extended into the adjacent works, which lead from one space to another, prolonging the works conceptually, spatially and provisionally. Because this dynamism, the incarnation of the sentimental, knows no servitude. It moves forward uncontrollably, just like the rhinoceros that breaks through the supporting margins in order to invade the wall, where one of the most categorical formal emblems of this work lies. The imposed acceleration on contemporary life can have, does have, other bearings; it can become a philosophy of existence. An acceleration filtered by the subject’s will which converts her into the medium director of her trajectories.
Javier Hernando. Madrid, april 2002.