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Formula

Elena Alonso

05.2022


In 1884 Edwin A. Abbot, an English ecclesiastic and expert in Shakespeare, imagined a two-dimensional world in his unique book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.

Between social satire and mathematical daydream, Flatland depicts a flat universe in which a colorful group of geometric beings manage to co-exist.

To represent three dimensions on a plane is easy, you only have to follow a series of rules of perspective and perception falls under a spell.

However collapsing or amplifying spatial dimensions requires a more abstract imagination that goes against the rules of our ordinary perception.

What Elena Alonso proposes in her new twist is an ambiguous game, a formula to incorporate new strata into living elements that accommodate and resist to each other, swaying between soft and sharp.

Appliques, nipples, folds, corners, prosthetics... everything oscillates around a powerful axis that pursues an impossible balance between two opposite poles: the natural and the constructed.

Elena Alonso's work has always involved a dance of faculties and affections, precision refers to the intimate, the platonic assaults the organic, structure and ornament are mixed into a cluster of possible meanings.

In this exhibition, a superimposition of layers is presented in which volume and objects made with different materials (metal, resin, plaster, wood) refer to the construction of a body. But this object is also a skin or lining; an interior of pure exteriority.

When looking at Flatland, a three-dimensional observer is able to simultaneously see the interior and exterior of its houses and its inhabitants, just as one looking at a blueprint can see the thickness of the walls, or a section of the interior of a body.

Likewise, passing through the work of Elena Alonso, each composition simultaneously reduces and amplifies our perception of the elements in play, allowing us to contemplate the thickness of each layer and the modulable relationship between plane and plane.

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