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