Despite the fact that Kandinsky demonstrated a great interest for Astronomy throughout his career -to such a degree that he considered constructing an observatory in his home in Moscow as early as 1905- it’s not clear that he was familiar with research on cosmic radiation, which was discovered in the same year, 1911, in which he moved toward abstraction. But in his Theosophy-derived ideas about the Cosmos, clearly echoed in his painting, we find intuitions that could be associated with cosmic rays. For Kandinsky, a work of art was the result of catastrophic collisions, and a product of an internal need incited by psychological “irradiations,” the sound vibrations that emanate from all the matter that surrounds us. And, as Linarejos Moreno (Madrid, 1974) has detected with great perception, there is a surprising coincidence between certain configurations in his work from the twenties -principally in the illustrations from Point and Line to Plane- and the photographs of cosmic rays taken decades later. Obviously, Kandinsky could not have seen these images, but the artist -who has been exploring a fertile line of historical connections between science and art- imagines that he might have perceived them. After all, cosmic particulates from violent galaxies pierce our brains incessantly. And that energy draws and sketches.

Linarejos Moreno recovered old photographs taken by meteorologist Charles Wilson with the “cloud chamber” that he invented in that crucial year of 1911 to make cosmic particles visible. From there, she takes two leaps through time. The first takes her to the seventies, when those other aforementioned photos were taken using “bubble chambers,” with far more sophisticated results that seem to be “negatives” of Kandinsky’s compositions. The second jump leads to the present, when she herself has become an observer of astral electricity by using the cloud chamber on exhibit in the neighboring National Museum of Science and Technology in Alcobendas to photograph and film the fleeting traces. The artist has chosen a pair of images from each of these three moments and transferred them to large burlap pieces, using her unique “photopainting” technique, in which she applies glazed layers of white over the support and the printed photographs, achieving the effect of a ghostly “apparition.” The effect echoes the dense clouds captured by Wilson’s camera, clouds in which the energy of the Cosmos is revealed.

In the video, a front recording of the cloud chamber, we witness the rain of particles directly while listening to a fragment of Three piano pieces, Opus 11, by Arnold Schönberg. With this soundtrack, which is well-suited to the electrical spectacle, Linarejos Moreno recalls the decisive encounter between Kandinsky and the composer in a concert that took place, again, in 1911, and in which the composer played the piece. Schönberg confirmed the painter’s sense of the musicality of the language of the cosmos, the musicality of those vibrations that the painter would translate into colors and abstract lines. Moreno glosses that idea through a sculptural, spatial mechanism for capturing vibrations: she has crossed the room with a giant musical instrument made of a large, heavy metal beam -on which she displays five copies of Point and Line to Plane- and one single cord that flies out to one of the burlap pieces and enters into the drawing. Taken together, it is an elegant essay on the poetry of science, the music of the spheres.

ELENA VOZMEDIANO, El Mundo, supplement El Cultural, January 26th, 2018, Print Edition.