Broken Open. Curated by Cristina Anglada – Luis Adelantado Valencia

Text/Dossier/3D View

 
 
Broken Open. Curated by Cristina Anglada
Mercedes Azpilicueta, Esperanza Collado, Marius Engh, Ana Martínez Fernández, Mónica Mays, Alex Reynolds, Alfredo Rodríguez, Víctor Santamarina, Yann Sérandour, M Reme Silvestre, Álvaro Urbano, Kristin Wenzel y Leticia Ybarra

 
 
Broken Open, 2022. Room 1. General view
Mercedes Azpilicueta. À mon seul dèsir, 2019. Natural linen, two-tone natural silk, thread. 250 x 140 cm
Broken Open, 2022. Room 1. General view
Mónica Mays. Chrysalid (Tending Towards), 2022. Sheepskin, flowers, leaves, silk cocoons, raw wool, glass, wood. 80 x 200 x 30 cm
Broken Open, 2022. Room 1. General view
Mónica Mays. Broken Chair, 2022. Wood, rattan, locksmith. 45 x 36 x 8 cm
Broken Open, 2022. Room 1. General view
Kristin Wenzel. Pearl, 2022. Enamelled ceramic, nickel plated. 48 x 26 x 17 cm
Kristin Wenzel. Hazel, 2020. Enamelled ceramic, nickel plated. 23 x 28 x 8 cm
Broken Open, 2022. Room 1. General view
Álvaro Urbano. He would always leave a window open, even at night, 2022. Metal and paint. Variable dimensions
Kristin Wenzel. Lillith, 2020. Enamelled ceramic, nickel plated. 35 x 33 x 6 cm
Broken Open, 2022. Room 1. General view
Mónica Mays. Tending Towards, 2022. Sheepskin, flowers, leaves, led. 56 x 38 x 19 cm / 65 x 30 x 15 cml
Broken Open, 2022. Room 2. General view
Ana Martínez Fernández. Cortina (serrín), 2021. Silicone, sawdust, wood, plastic and aluminum. 120 x 150 x 3 cm
Ana Martínez Fernández. Cortina (serrín), 2021. Silicone, sawdust, wood, plastic and aluminum. 120 x 150 x 3 cm. Detalle
Broken Open, 2022. Room 2. General view
Alfredo Rodríguez. Darkyoga, 2016. Holographic emulsion, resin, glass, lacquered aluminum. 110 x 65 cm
Broken Open, 2022. Room 2. General view
M Reme Silvestre. Sin título, 2019. Arm covers, black dye, epoxy resin, nutritional supplement powder, boric acid. 14 x 230 x 16 cm
Broken Open, 2022. Room 2. General view
Marius Engh. Double Fantasy # 1 - 4, 2015. Photography, inkjet on matte paper and stamp.
68 x 51.5 cm
Ana Martínez Fernández. Gorra I (hilo), 2021. Epoxy resin, canvas thread. 31 x 42 x 12 cm / Gorra III (hilo), 2021. Epoxy resin, canvas thread. 61 x 42 x 12 cm
Ana Martínez Fernández. Gorra I (hilo), 2021. Epoxy resin, canvas thread. 31 x 42 x 12 cm
Broken Open, 2022. Room 3. General view
Esperanza Collado. Loose Ends, 2022. Installation with loop film (super 16mm, b/w and color, 4’), roll of felt (80 cm x 10 m), adhesive vinyl (2 x 3.90 m) and 12 pieces of clay and plaster. Detail
Esperanza Collado. Loose Ends, 2022. Installation with loop film (super 16mm, b/w and color, 4’), roll of felt (80 cm x 10 m), adhesive vinyl (2 x 3.90 m) and 12 pieces of clay and plaster. Detail
Esperanza Collado. Loose Ends, 2022. Installation with loop film (super 16mm, b/w and color, 4’), roll of felt (80 cm x 10 m), adhesive vinyl (2 x 3.90 m) and 12 pieces of clay and plaster. Detail
Esperanza Collado. Loose Ends, 2022. Installation with loop film (super 16mm, b/w and color, 4’), roll of felt (80 cm x 10 m), adhesive vinyl (2 x 3.90 m) and 12 pieces of clay and plaster. Detail
Esperanza Collado. Loose Ends, 2022. Installation with loop film (super 16mm, b/w and color, 4’), roll of felt (80 cm x 10 m), adhesive vinyl (2 x 3.90 m) and 12 pieces of clay and plaster. Detail
Esperanza Collado. Loose Ends, 2022. Installation with loop film (super 16mm, b/w and color, 4’), roll of felt (80 cm x 10 m), adhesive vinyl (2 x 3.90 m) and 12 pieces of clay and plaster. Detail
Esperanza Collado. Loose Ends, 2022. Installation with loop film (super 16mm, b/w and color, 4’), roll of felt (80 cm x 10 m), adhesive vinyl (2 x 3.90 m) and 12 pieces of clay and plaster. Detail
Broken Open, 2022. Room 4. General view
M Reme Silvestre. Sin título, 2021. Cabin filter and human hair. 29 x 17.7 x 3 cm
M Reme Silvestre. Sin título, 2021. Cabin filter and human hair. 29 x 17.7 x 3 cm. Detail
Alfredo Rodríguez. Clue, 2022. Silver gelatin on RC paper, lacquered aluminum and synthetic resin. 70 x 50 cm
Broken Open, 2022. Room 4. General view
Yann Sérandour. Mirror #546, 2011. UV printing on brushed aluminum. 121 x 98.4 cm
Broken Open, 2022. Room 4. General view
Broken Open, 2022. Room 4. General view
Victor Santamarina. Foundation V, 2021. Aluminum. 108 x 75 x 5 cm
Ana Martínez Fernández. Gorra I (lascas), 2021. Dyed epoxy resin, dried paint chips. 28 x 18 x 10 cm
Ana Martínez Fernández. Gorra I (lascas), 2021. Dyed epoxy resin, dried paint chips. 28 x 18 x 10 cm
Victor Santamarina. Foundation IV, 2021. Aluminum. 98 x 75 x 5 cm
Yann Sérandour. Mirror #743, 2011. UV printing on brushed aluminum. 110.5 x 61.3 cm
Leticia Ybarra. I Shouldn’t Say Cat, 2022. Gardening gloves, finger puppets, stainless steel puppet control rods, ink. Variable dimensions
Leticia Ybarra. I Shouldn’t Say Cat, 2022. Gardening gloves, finger puppets, stainless steel puppet control rods, ink. Variable dimensions. Detail
Broken Open, 2022. Room 5. General view
Alex Reynolds. Palais, del pie al ojo a la mano, 2930”, 2022. Diptych, pencil on paper. 51.5 x 66 cm / 51.5 x 42.5 cm
Alex Reynolds. Palais, del pie al ojo a la mano, 2930”, 2022. Diptych, pencil on paper. 51.5 x 66 cm / 51.5 x 42.5 cm. Detalle
Alex Reynolds. Palais, 2020. HD video. 34’ 40’’
Alex Reynolds. Palais, 2020. HD video. 34’ 40’’
Alex Reynolds. Palais, 2020. HD video. 34’ 40’’


 
 

Text


Broken Open is the title of the group exhibition opening at Galería Luis Adelantado on 27 May. Showcasing the work of thirteen artists, the core

idea at the heart of the project is intrigue, addressed as an entanglement, mesh or knot that acts as a thread that will lead our bodies on a walkthrough of the gallery’s various spaces. The series of textiles, sculptures, objects, photographs, installations and audiovisual works we come across in the various rooms trigger all kinds of disparate stories indulging the imagination and speculative pleasure.
Nature is disclosed as a disquieting place where the unexpected can happen. Kristin Wenzel conceived the series Wild Orchids while out walking in the countryside during the height of lockdown, in which socialization and flirting were replaced by the exuberance and mystery of forests and their dwellers. Here we can see a selection of pieces from that series, made up of glazed ceramic sculptural works emulating orchids with colourful fleshy tongues and water dripping in their cavities. Inert, fruitless objects, with neither sap or bees inside, but which nevertheless spur desire and imagination, at once attractive and repellent.
The art term Baroque was borrowed from the name of an irregular pearl known as the baroque pearl, and is understood as a trans-historical, expressive force of hybrid forms in continuous metamorphosis with the present, plural and full of cracks, of diffuse edges and deformed perspectives. A return to the rural countryside and paganism, to primeval chaos, to the essence. All this can be readily gleaned from Wenzel’s installation, but it can equally be applied to the work of Mónica Mays and Mercedes Azpilicueta, two artists who leverage this strategy with a view to exalting the senses and to confronting the limitations of meaning head-on. Both engage with a kind of new baroque world in which instability and proliferation counteract the idea of truth or the totalizing narrative. Besides sharing the first room on entering the gallery, the work of these two artists also have in common an evident intention to recover handcrafted techniques generally associated with women and, at the same time, with underground means of expression and forms of resistance.
Mónica Mays presents two works called Tending Towards, which comprise two bodies stuffed with wool and silk cocoons reminiscent of beds with headboards with all kinds of deformed organic elements. In these mutable pieces that defy all classification, animal and plant elements acquire anthropomorphized domestic forms. An unbounded presence, caught between states, seemingly in a process of decadence and decomposition, understood as a fertile, porous and cross-contaminating space.
Mercedes Azpilicueta presents two large textile works embroidered with two-tone natural silk and linen, on which the artist has sewn stitches as

if drawing, conjuring figures and elements that create a score for a larger action, and also highly intimate scenes divested of any sense of linear narrative. One of them contains the inscription À mon seul désir (To my only desire), a quotation referring to The Lady and the Unicorn who silently dwell within the medieval tapestries Mercedes visited at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. The other textile has the word “Ruda” sewn on it, in reference to the plant which was believed to have protective and abortive powers and was used in magical rites since ancient times. The etymology of ruta is derived from the Latin rupta (a paved, cleared or ‘broken’ road).
We will search for crumbs of bread that might provide clues on how to starting reading these stories. A group of metal elements painted with meticulous detail emulates weeds and cigarette butts strewn on the floor in one of the corners at the entrance to the gallery. Álvaro Urbano creates installations that conceive a space and its inhabitants as possible co-authors of a narration. His usual point of departure is architecture, fiction, theatre and heterotopia (other, disturbing, contradictory spaces). In this case, he activates a mental, dreamlike and sentient landscape; an immersive experience in which the spectator must finish the story.
Overpowering vital forces are not only channelled through natural phenomena (flora, fauna, bodies), but also ordinary objects that can undergo all kinds of enchantments and be modified with the right combination of words. For Marius Engh, things have the power to retain and offer information, but also to generate new readings in other contexts and, in turn, to produce displacements of official cultural narratives. On this occasion he presents four photographic images from the series Double Fantasy, a title borrowed from the seventh and final album made by Yoko Ono and John Lennon in 1980. The couple are photographed in Gibraltar on their wedding day in 1969, in a small stamp in each photo in the series, where the rough, uneven interiors of caves dyed in colours and highly marked textures transport us to another parallel reality.
Leticia Ybarra is a poet, artist and curator. Her more recent works are the result of investigation into formal and poetic aspects of discourse and the displaced gesture as a possible queer strategy, opening up a surplus of meanings. I Shouldn’t Say Cat combines two strange objects that recall a ventriloquist’s glove puppet whose body supports the head and paws of a cat. With these elements she activates different stories centred on the figure of the famous dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, a fascinating character whose relationship with Diaghilev, the director of Ballets Russes, as well as his boss and lover, was underwritten by a confusion between power and submission, something very much to the fore in ventriloquism which, in turn, creates an accumulation of desire and eroticism which the dancer rendered on stage in a homo- erotically charged dance which the audience contested by calling him “half- cat” and “half-puppet”.
Ana Martínez Fernández’s curtain and hats are arranged in the space in a poetic to-and-fro suspended in a limbo where words are slippery. These are sculptural proposals that displace social narratives in all their complexity. The chosen objects have the ability to conceal and reveal. Both have an evident decorative, artificial thrust: they protect us from excess light and at the same time they allow us to see without being seen. This is the same seeing and not seeing, hiding and showing, that also takes place indirectly in the mechanisms of desire and intimacy.
Yann Sérandour presents four UV prints on polished aluminium, simulating mirrors with differing frames, but the lack of reflection creates a sense of frustration in our engagement with them. The mirror, beyond its everyday function, encloses manifold intrigues. Associated with the moon and with water, it has often been viewed as a medium between the visible and the invisible world; a recurrent object in fairy tales and legends, it is related with superstition, magic and fortune-telling, revealing the truth or a portent of back luck. Building a narrative could be a form of filling in gaps, giving meaning to a set of events whose documentary sources have been forgotten.
On view in the third room is Loose Ends, a film by the artist-researcher Esperanza Collado. A projector screens a series of juxtaposed images and recurrent objects that call to mind surrealist film. The rhythm is paused, the discursive structure eschews linearity and the dreamlike atmosphere keeps us in a state of illusion. The projection is coupled with a series of elements redolent of issues the artist has been exploring over recent years: the performativity of language and writing, the phenomenological aspects of the medium, the spatial, sculptural, political, social and choreographic potentialities of film at the end of the era of cinema, or the dematerialization of the medium in art practices today.
Alfredo Rodríguez is showing three works in which photography is presented in multiple processes as pure alchemy and the human body as its core focus. Snapshots of different parts of the body of the woman with whom he has shared his life for over twenty years are at the groundbase of his experimentation. One of them engages with his personal approach to working with holography, in this case treating holographic emulsion as if it were photographic emulsion. A work that contains images that appear and disappear, at once mutating colours and forms. A work in another room showcases the suggestive experimental photographic results obtained from the use of laser light on holographic sculptures. The third one is a large collage of a fragmented, transformed and mutant body.
Victor Santamarina presents a floor installation made by coupling various puddles of aluminium that have been formed by discharges, leaks, tides and multidirectional flows. They are the product of an intuitive and sensorial exploration in which the artist establishes a peculiar negotiation between his body and the materials. The work is unfolded in its full potential through the material and its poetic use, revealing a quality that is more spatial than object-based, at once producing a wide spectrum of reflections responding to the ambient light.
M Reme Silvestre exhibits objects and materials that operate disturbingly as a kind of trace left by couplings, contacts and rubbings of contemporary bodies and prosthesis. Untitled (railing) is comprised of arm-covers made from technical material solidified with resin that refer to body parts through their absence, a metaphor of the body as recipient. The small pieces with filters with hair also engage with the remains of the vulnerable body, controlled and subjected by the demands of production of today’s system.
On the top floor of the gallery we can see the audiovisual piece Palais, filmed by Alex Reynolds. A body leads us on a stealthy, rushed and somewhat nervous path through the labyrinthine bureaucratic rooms of a nineteenth- century monumental building: Palace of Justice in Brussels. The intrigue unfolds in a game proposed by the artist, altering the conventions of storytelling and our reception, challenging our structures of perception, stimulating the curiosity of the spectator, who must project and finish the work. The installation is coupled with a diptych of pencil drawings rendering part of the path in two dimensions.
Broken Open proposes a whole series of disparate narratives arranged around the space with the intention of short-circuiting the automatic reflexes of our understanding process, to indulge in the surplus of meaning and the ornamentation of the narrative knot. A magical anarchism of sorts full of crossover symbolism that aspires to elude the excessive clarity of unequivocal explanation. The works invite a loitering, full of ambiguity and layers, that scratches the surface in order to see what is beneath the outer communicative layer of the pieces; a walkthrough that comes and goes, up and down, and starts all over again.

We would like to thank the collaboration of all the artists as well as the galleries Espacio Valverde, Madrid; gb agency, Paris; NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona/Madrid; Travesía Cuatro, Madrid and SUPRAINFINIT, Romania and Faculty of Fine Arts of Cuenca.