ese entredós
Lucía Bayón
18th February – 14th May 2022
Madrid
ese entredós
Lucía Bayón
18th February – 14th May 2022
The title of this presentation, ese entredós, is borrowed from a verse of a poem1 by the artist Pepe Espaliú. In one of the artist’s final works, El nido, performed in 1993, he walked in continuous circles on a platform mounted high up a tree for eight days, taking off one piece of clothing every day until, on the last one, he was stripped entirely naked. Moving between one end (fully clothed) and another (fully naked) on his wooden entrapment, the artist might have encountered a sudden fluidity of being: both concealed and exposed, neither covered nor bare. Stuck in a transitional space, with two sides touching each other, his body formed a continuum.
Like Espaliú, Lucía Bayón is interested in movements of circularity and spaces in- between – specifically when it comes to the (de) construction of garments. The French word ‘entredeux’, of which ‘entredós’ is a translation, refers to the intermediate state between extremes, to a piece of furniture placed amidst two windows, and most commonly, to a laddered stitching that joins pieces of fabric together. The decorative holes of the embroidery open up as they bind. It is upon these axes that Bayón presents her new body of work: a constellation of textile imaginaries, bas- reliefs and sculptures, shaped by gestures that interrogate material hierarchies and the conditions of production.
Sprawled across these rooms are dark blue armours enforced with denim pulp and slim rectangles reminiscent of water troughs, patched together from plastered cardboard. Items of clothing have been unraveled at the seams, their parts inverted and laid out to form a new whole. Billowing folds, steps and soles draw into creases as they protrude from the walls. These pieces are each based on processes that have become a constant in Bayón’s practice: hours and hours are put into the pulping of paper and cloth, whose shredded fibers take on a renewed function as the artist’s raw material. Combining industrial and manual processing methods, Bayón sustains a circuit – one that enmeshes the residual in slow becoming.
In her formulation of the works the artist has taken the notion of pattern as a guiding principle. The construction of garment patterns resembles that of the construction of a mould. Herein a set of abstracted, flat pieces – a pocket, a shirt sleeve – come together and gain volume. A fullness is developed from surfaces.
ese entredós designates a liminal space where processes permeate each other and binary regimes of meaning-making are discarded. Instead we are met with a manifold tension, with an opaque accumulation of layers, where the weft has ripened into a thick materiality. Seamstresses used to hide private inscriptions in the lining of coats and jackets, on the reverse of the fabric; the side that faces the interior of a garment. Never seen by the wearer or beholder, it is not quite in front of us, but not far away either.
Dagmar Bosma
[2018] Alcaide, J.(Ed). Pepe Espaliú. La imposible verdad. Textos 1987 – 1993. La Bella Varsovia, Madrid.
Given Time
Marina G. Guerreiro
7th October – 18th December 2021
Intersticio is very pleased to present Given Time, Marina G. Guerreiro first solo exhibition with the gallery and in the UK. Thanks to the generous support of the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in London.
Marina González Guerreiro (A Guarda, Spain, 1992) explores her practice through an installative approximation to different mediums like sculpture, video, photography or painting, the artist revises te iconographic imaginary around the idea of happiness, putting special attention to the phenomenons related with the emotions and the management of stress as well as the construction of an idealized nature. Her creative process starts with the accumulation of materials, becoming the studio a space for trial, where objects and images from the most diverse origins live together stating a ritual of the intimate. In her work we sense a preciosity constructed through precarious and old materials, as well as the research of equilibrium between order and disorder, control and chance, reason and emotion.
The artist is graduated in Fine Arts by the University of Salamanca (Spain) and has also a Master in Artistic Production by the Universitat Politècnica of Valencia (Spain). Some of her most recent solo shows include: Una Promesa at Galería Rosa Santos (Valencia, Spain, 2020), LMXJVSD at Pols (Valencia, Spain, 2020), Work Hard, Dream Big (Internet Moon Gallery, 2019), Luchar, creer at Galería Adora Calvo (Salamanca, Spain, 2018). She has taken part group shows like Lifting Belly at Centro centro (Madrid, Spain, 2020), Una imagen que no duela ni cueste mirar at Sala de arte joven (Madrid, Spain, 2019), Un gesto que permanece at Salón (Madrid, Spain 2019), PAM!PAM!17 at IVAM (Valencia, Spain, 2017). In the next months she will have solo shows at ‘Bungalow’ a project part of Chertluedde gallery in Berlin (Germany) and La Casa Encendida (Madrid, Spain).
Related Text by Raúl Lorenzo Pérez + Artist Bio (PDF)
Lo otro maravilloso
Nora Aurrekoetxea, Sarah Bechter,
Michael & Chiyan Ho and Augusta Lardy
11th December 2021 – 12th February 2022
Intersticio is pleased to present his new exhibition in Madrid, Lo otro maravilloso, including works by Nora Aurrekoetxea, Sarah Bechter, Michael & Chiyan Ho and Augusta Lardy.
It is on “the other side” where the symbolic matrix that gives life to these works is found. The other side -that of sleep, emotion, intimacy, and silenced cultures-, not being governed by the European rational norm, offers greater connection to “the real” as an irreducible and irrepresentable force from logical systems and closed codes. From their different intimacies, the artists of this collective exhibition show how the experience of the wonderful takes place. When this happens, the attention numbed by the cultural norm is awakened and the gaze broadens its sensibilities by integrating “the other” into the cartography of a magical reality.
The fragile, vulnerable to being transformed and even broken, becomes support structure in the work of Nora Aurrekoetxea. The braid pattern turns the hair filament into a tough fabric or lattice. Formed by a multiplicity of hard and elastic units, the braid is a symbol of everyday life and strength. Isolated from the body that carries it or makes it and reproduced in bronze, it refers totemically to the spaces of intimacy and care, revealing the wonderful in its apparent simplicity.
Sarah Bechter shows the ontological density of the soft and tender worlds, conjuring them into vaporous landscapes that subvert the invisible VS visible antagonism. Thus, reality which escapes the dualistic hierarchy of the Western mind – and which also does not wish to disarm its nature-claims its existence. Using transparency, Bechter finds a place in the representational space for the affections that are generated through touch, in everyday and domestic environments.
A polyphonic network of knowledge and traditions, fetishes, projections and echoes is expressed in the work of Michael and Chyian Ho. Navigating between-voices as communicating bodies, they display a mode of attention that allows them to interpret both the
more audible frequencies of western hegemony, like the traces of other sounds whose potency disrupts the landscape. His artistic practice relaxes the modes of perception of the Western ego to attend to the mystery of a world that appears as real as wonderful.
From the transfusions that occur between day and night, vigil and sleep, Augusta Lardy works the dream. As a continuum, shared reality and dream intimacy appear in permeable, hybrid stages. In her painting, color composes the emotional sense of ritual scenes where the subject abandons identity. Lardy places faceless bodies in “other” scenarios that, not participating in the cultural social norm, could be called magical.
Sara Torres
Passau University, Germany
Nora Aurrekoetxea Etxebarria's CV (PDF)
Decapitar al caimán
Lorena Ancona
10th September – 20th November 2021
Intersticio is pleased to present Decapitar al caimán the first solo show exhibition in Europa by artist Lorena Ancona (MX, 1981). For this occasion, the artist presents old and new pieces, researching the ethnology of the materials as well as its relationship with the historic process and the memory, traversing the personal and the collective.
Jaws of the abyss as access to a cave, in America the caiman is an animal associated with the land. Is in this relation between interior, ground and water that his presence represents fertility, as well as respect and veneration for nature and territory.
To ‘Decapitate the cayman’ refers to the Mayan Myth of renovation and creation of the world, related to the idea of inundation where the image of the cayman is used. It emerges as a mythic creature symbolizing the Earth and, when it is decapitated, blood spreads up from its head, or rain, or esencial liquid for the creation of a regenerating world.
The cayman’s capacity to move both in water and land, surrounds esencial ideas of landscape and makes it the guardian of the precious water, relating its figure to agriculture and particularly corn. This seed has been venerated because of its development during prehispanic times as the fundamental source that originated and nurtured the American civilizations, giving the possibility for thousands of years of dominating a complex territory in its wild nature.
Starting from an exploration of local materials, prehispanic traditions and symbology related to the south-east of Mexico, the artist takes as a reference passages from the Codex of Madrid and the Codex of Dresde. Both testimonies have been the very few to survive the conquest, most of them having been burnt on the ‘Auto de fe de Maní’, when Fray Diego de Landa incinerated several sacred objects and hundreds of Mayan codexes.
At the vortex of an era when nature it’s approaching its limit of imminent wear, to ‘decapite the caiman’ seems like the fundamental ritual of detachment and regeneration.
Lorena Ancona (MX, 1981) works with sculpture and ceramics, weaving through the historiography of dyes, pigments, natural materials and Mesoamerican places. His work is the result of a research-based practice that questions the intangible displacements of forgotten traditions, heritage and identities. Using speculative techniques as an artistic methodology, her work is focused in the analysis and identification of mineral and ethnic biocultural environments. Ancona has studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and at Escuela Nacional de Pintura Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda. Recently, she has participated in group shows at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris or the Carreras Múgica gallery in Bilbao. This September she will take part on a symposium at the British Museum in London that will discuss the Mayan blue and its cultural and historical value.