Emma Herbin’s daily life develops along predictable lines wherever she is, unless it is one of the short periods of time throughout the year she devotes to architecture.  Whether in Buenos Aires, where she was born and bred, or in London, Paris or Madrid, where she has lived in the past, or in Barcelona, where she currently lives and works, her perception and understanding of the world translates into drawings on the paper napkins she finds in bars and cafés. Their sequence creates stories that add up to a graphic autobiography. To draw in pencil or in ink is as essential to Emma Herbin as breathing.  Her art is her very essence.  I imagine that without it she would lose her soul. If Faust sold his soul to the devil to achieve timeless youth, Ms. Herbin sold it to art, with the loving and obsessive intervention of her father, a secret artist in a bourgeois society little receptive to the differences imposed by sensibility and artistic talent.

Ms. Herbin mounts her napkins on rolls of toilet paper, or on rolls of kitchen paper.  These can be stretched into tapestries or into installations. In either case we are conscious of their scatological implications.

Alina Tortosa     Buenos Aires  August  2007