Soledad Sevilla: Back Where She Belongs : Art: A room-size installation by the artist is included in Cal State Long Beach’s exhibition ‘Imagines Liricas: New Spanish Visions.’

In Cervantes’ picaresque classic, Don Quixote sets off on his knightly crusade at the first light of dawn, a time that Spanish artist Soledad Sevilla calls “the hour of freedom, that special hour when so many things can happen, and time seems to stand still.”

“It Must Have Been Daybreak,” an installation by the artist included in the exhibition “Imagines Liricas: New Spanish Visions,” at Cal State Long Beach, re-creates that poetic moment. Sevilla was inspired by Cervantes’ words, and, with an engineering consultant, orchestrated a web of white cotton threads, strung between the walls of a room painted an ethereal blue. As artificial light is selectively reflected by the filaments and mirrored in an enameled black floor that looks as if it were covered with water, the space seems caught in that instant between night and day.

Sevilla, 47, shares with other artists in the Long Beach show a desire to materialize the intangible in her work. But unlike many of her contemporaries who capture emotions in dense, Expressionist paintings, her installations envelop the spectator in precise investigations of space which have their origin in conceptual studies of nature, cultural rituals and historic places.

Born in Valencia and a longtime resident of Madrid, the artist now lives in the Moorish city of Granada not far from the Alhambra, whose provocative pools and fountains inspired a previous series of works. Photographs of the ruins of a 16th-Century castle, sets of architectural plans and pastel sketches of perforated metal doors are evidence of a number of new projects, which prevented her from traveling to Los Angeles to personally install her piece.

Sevilla explained that she was not very interested in the history and traditions of Spain until she lived in Boston, where she spent two years on a grant, studying geometric abstraction at Harvard University.

“When I went to the United States, I was really rejecting my environment and my culture,” she said. “But when I got there, I saw it another way. The available influences didn’t seem important enough for me to forget about my roots--I suddenly saw very clearly where I belonged.”

With a season’s pass to the bullfights and a sketchbook in hand, Sevilla has undertaken a lengthy study of that most typical Spanish ritual. It has been the subject of more than one recent exhibition, in which she has concentrated on the bullfighter’s cape as a symbol of the perpetual tension, human hierarchies and repetitive rhythms which she says are the real essence of the event. In one installation, sold to a new hotel in Barcelona’s Olympic Village, a circle of capes, whose shapes capture various stages of the bullfighter’s pass, stand phantom-like in a semi-circle. In another series of paintings and drawings, the bullfight has been reduced to mere shadows of the participants’ movements. In this way, as in other works, Sevilla communicates the feelings evoked by a specific time and place.

She said that bullfighting is indeed a particular world, which not everyone has a taste for, much less as a basis for an artwork. “There are a lot of people in this country too who see bullfighting as pure sadism,” she said. “What’s very clear is that you don’t get anywhere with arguments. No one can convince anyone about the bulls.

“I know that when I’m at the plaza watching a bullfight, my heart leaps from my chest, and I know I’m where I need to be at the moment I need to be there. It’s something that you can’t explain.”

Intrigued by the poetry of popular culture, Sevilla’s work is unusual in a country where artists tend toward more academic exploration, and painting is respected above other contemporary media. She began creating installations not only because of what she felt were painting’s spatial limitations, but also in answer to the limited tolerance of the art world. In her first site-specific work, Sevilla pasted 36,000 red carnations on the walls of the gallery.

“It was sort of a protest,” she said, “because after being away from Spain for two years, I came back with work that was more rational and more geometric, when Expressionism was what was in style. So my work was rejected for reasons which didn’t convince me at all.

“I chose the flower as a symbol of something universal--nobody is going to reject a flower because it’s not in style. It’s something that’s there, and exists with man in a natural way, the way that art should, instead of being subject to trends.”

Sevilla’s latest project is to symbolically replace the patio of a renaissance castle in southern Spain, which was ripped out and sold to a French decorator in 1904. After a period in a Park Avenue mansion, it was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She undertook the work mostly as a romantic idea, but also sees it as an environmental statement. “There are many ways to violate the environment,” she said. “Destroying the patrimony is one of them.”