Some Words
Trick, trap, artifice, ingenuity, skill, switch, mechanism. This is an exhibition that knots together several tensions—the sensual and the industrial, the carnal and the mechanical, raw matter and formal design—which do not cancel each other out, with one prevailing over another. It remains in one and the other, because it knows that from the slippery there is much more to learn.\n\nBut above all, this is an eminently carnal, corporeal, and sensual exhibition. These vectors have always been present in Elena Alonso's work, even though a precise and polished formalization might have made it seem like something else entirely. They become more evident in Visita Guiada (Matadero Madrid, 2017), where she proposes a journey through space articulated through touch, punctuated by the texture of a serpentine handrail. Or in Antojo (Querer Parecer Noche, CA2M, 2018), where we caress with our gaze a body made into an arch, whose voussoirs and appliqués neither dispel sexual interpretations nor confirm them. The same occurs here: Maqueta, for example, is a piece formed by a center of honey-glazed tiles upon which rest two olive wood protuberances, backed by two wings of plaster mixed with ash. It could be a table, an element of architecture lying on the floor, or simply a resting body. In it one can discern orifices, folds, and soft mounds, genderless sexual forms that do not permit a single interpretation, but rather: explode into an ambiguous infinity of readings. Uncertain forms that resonate throughout the exhibition space, as if it were a resonance chamber—stronger in the works, more subtle in the details, like the device painted on the gallery walls. Pleat, wrinkle, fold, cleft, swelling, thigh, buttock, seagull.\n\nThere is in fact something equally ambiguous and suggestive in the artist's insistent use of plaster, which summons different disparate applications of this material: the ornaments, moldings, and claddings of interior architecture, the modeling and proofs of sculpture, but also the function of immobilization and repair of broken bones in medicine. In the pieces from the Modelo series—which could well be protruding wall fragments, plates revealing a body on a surgical operating table, or a mechanical engineering drawing—various incisions are carved with tools into the flesh of this material, subsequently softened in their contours. In these reliefs one can discern the traces of the artist's corporeal-manual language: each material, each mixture, each form arises from gesture, from the pressure or the imprinted caress of Elena. Mason, cabinetmaker, mother, farmer, surgeon, watchmaker. In turn, from these openings and surfaces other materials protrude, ranging from bright brass, dark mahogany, and translucent tortoiseshell, to resins or graphite traces. They are appliqués that coexist in different relationships with the body that hosts them: at times completely fused or half-swallowed, at times protruding violently, as if spat out or in full flight. This coexistence of foreign elements gently shakes the supposed integrity of these models, in a series of productive tensions that redefine the body of the work with new vocabularies: prosthesis, graft, hairpiece, ornament, tumor, implant, socket.\n\nWith all this, the space created by the exhibition breathes a calm and reposeful temporality, of a rather warm temperature, largely granted by the range of materials in use. These evoke a whole sensory spectrum ranging from the velvety touch of ash, the humid density of plaster, to the fragrance of woods such as amaranth, walnut, or olive. All of them endow the space with a textural quality, as if it were a skin at times soft and porous, at times shiny and oily. But this calm environment given by the balance between forms and composition is shaken by the affective currents and expressive contrasts that traverse the pieces, stripped of clear referential readings. And it is precisely there, between the material affective bubbling, the sensuality of forms, and interpretive promiscuity, that the exciting nature of this project resides. Illusionism, ruse, stratagem, trick, magic, truco.\n\nJulia Morandeira Arrizabalaga