One of the artistic currents with more game and validity still today is the eccentric abstraction. Whoever coined this term in 1966, the historian and pioneer of feminist art theory Lucy R. Lippard, was unaware of the extent to which art was retarding its decrepitude, and although the concept itself was already “a premise of death”, since it referred to something indefinite (a painting, a sculpture, an “environment”), functioned as a new universal language that the artist —or rather, the female artists, who were the majority— saw fit to explain the processes and the literality of their bodies and how these were inscribed somewhere between the structure and the reference.
Those works, partial objects indebted to psychoanalysis and surrealism, shaped a visual Esperanto —and why not, also a style— that compressed dualities (hardness/softness, precision/chance, geometry/free forms, natural/industrial), registering in he the works of historical as Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois or Ree Morton. Today they are common currency in many artistic manifestations, in the form of blockbusters (the one by Yayoi Kusama at the Guggenheim Museum is recommended) or more discreet exhibitions. Of the latter, two make it possible to temporarily complete a solvent triangle within the Basque Country: in Artium (Vitoria) and in Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao)signed by Julia Spínola (44 years old) from Madrid and Bene Bergado (60 years old) from Salamanca, respectively.
The Espínola exhibition lacks artificial lighting: it changes depending on the time of day or the time of year
Spínola works with drawing, sculpture and architecture. His forms are gradual, and go from the eye and the body (as a fragment) to the cave, the wall, the studio, the museum. Its materials are light, screen prints, wood, metals, fabrics, ropes, cardboard or pieces of flint, which evoke the female body in a radical and poetic way, triggering identifications in which the viewer is and is not, depending on the incidence of natural light in the room. Because a particularity of this exhibition, curated by Catalina Lozano, is that it lacks artificial lighting; and thus, depending on the time of year, the time of day and the weather conditions —light enters through the oculi that connect the room with the internal square of the museum—, the works can be elegant abstractions or objects in the shadows from our experience.
Spínola is a builder of visual experiences. His pieces are semi-forms through which he abandons us to sensation. They are volatile and at the same time retain a long memory. An example is the small graffiti that the visitor will find almost without realizing it on the walls, brownish, red bioforms, escaped from an ancient syntax, like the paintings of the swimmers in the remote caves of Gilf Kebir, in the Egyptian desert, discovered by the Hungarian explorer László Almásy in 1933, gracefully immortalized in Anthony Minghella’s film The English Patient.
Julia Spínola’s lexicon of imagery is reminiscent not only of the domestic and bulbous Louise Bourgeois, but also participates in the sexual conventions of Robert Gober, with his infallible instinct for positioning himself in the corners of a space, tense but inciting, warm, always replying to the observer, as when he looks through the hole of a blunt object placed in the middle of the room, exposed to variations in natural light. It could be a giant rattlesnake or a cobra’s crop. In the end, we discover the best perspective of this counter-sculpture from a small hole in one of its ends, in what looks like a whale’s tail. Other objects—heads, spirals, dangling legs, caterpillar nests—have a consistent imperfection, they are not parts of victimized bodies, on the contrary, they are signs of the lost that precedes ecstasy. Everything gets out of hand in this exhibition with so many (in)significances, indications, such as forgotten, half-buried beach toys.
In Bene Bergado, however, the process is more evident, if we continue with the simile of the beach and the cinema, in the image of the Statue of Liberty that stands out close to the sea in Planet of the Apes. A post-apocalyptic world that this author installed between Madrid and Bilbao envisions in the present. The title of her retrospective, directed by Juan Luis Moraza, is Decrease, and it serves to represent a universe ordered to the decline of monumentality, both industrial and artistic. Bergado proposes “degrowth” (“living better with less”) to return to natural entropy, and not to that accelerated by unrestrained consumption and extractivist capitalism.
The exhibition is divided into four rooms and they are variations of some of his previous works/processes in Musac (León, 2016) and Alcalá 31 (Madrid, 2021). In the first the video is projected Prospect, where a list of chemical additives in food runs across the screen like film credits. In Battery, a 20-meter industrial shelf stores works, materials and books from his entire artistic career. This archive is followed by a more extroverted and at the same time intimate environment, Burned ground, which represents the fall of the signs of authority (the death of the father) through various objects and materials: a disassembled electrical tower that, however, can serve as a refuge for people who have left sleeping bags, suitcases, remains of food, between traps and hybrid forms cast in bronze that imitate vegetables and food in the process of decomposition. To one side, the schematic figure of an animal taking a nap. It looks like a polar bear that has escaped probable extinction. Its dazzling surface, like that of a jewel, expresses an irrefutable, melancholic, borderline vision of our planet.
‘Person, photo, copy’. Julia Spinola. Artium. Victory. Until 10 December.
‘Decrease’. Bene Bergado. Azkuna Zentroa Corn Exchange. Bilbao. Until January 7, 2024.
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