Estampa

Madrid, Spain - Oct. 19/22, 2023

"People like to feel, whatever it is" Virginia Woolf

"Who said it was easy” Audre Lorde

The skin of a room

Body fragments, flowers, perceptions, passions, love, desires, nightmares, fears, unspoken words, hidden sensations, frustrations, skin and other aspects of a room that invites us to merge with it. The body as territory, the self as a place in a room full of contradictory thoughts and emotions.

From the contemporary language of art, we see a room where Rosalía Banet and Veronica Ruth Frías, accompanied by Ana De Orbegoso and Silvia Levenson, open a dialogue between us, reality, finiteness and the desire to be, using an almost fetishistic aesthetic, to create sharp and intelligent reflections on the human being and his internal drives.

The skin is the largest organ in the human body. In an average adult it has an approximate surface area of ​​2 square meters and weighs around 5 kg. It is through it that our body reveals dysfunctions and discomforts that affect us, as well as shows our emotions: we sweat when we are nervous, we turn red if something embarrasses us and there are even emotions and stimuli that give us goosebumps.

It is a living organ with the capacity to regenerate, it is waterproof, resistant and flexible, it breathes and remains active 24 hours a day, carrying out a number of fundamental actions for our body. The skin is undoubtedly a vital organ for the human body. Is it also for our mind?

Paraphrasing Rosalía Banet, the skin is the point of connection with what surrounds us. And in this fragmented, complicated and often dark world, it seems that the skin is the one that has understood everything. And, as in a Liliana Cavani movie, the skin understand that what really counts is saving herself.

The skin and the body have been shown many times as a symbol of conquered territories, where violence is a message of power that ends up breaking the ties of the community and its environment. Four women show us their community and environment on the surface with their proposals.

Rosalía Banet, build the room with human flowers. A return to nature and its fusion with the human species that creates diversity without distinction of colors, origins or social condition. A single body, a deep exchange of skin with skin, a true intimate contact. The emergence of a precious human flower, with a magnificent pistil, complete, unique and indivisible in fusion with its environment. A powerful flower that shows itself reconstructed, global and without barriers: a skin flower.

Veronica Ruth Frías dresses us in an autobiographical, collective and performative pink. Her personal history, which could be ours, everyone's, is fused with that of the women who preceded her and with those who will follow. The artist embraces with her work the most urgent aspects of daily life and addresses a more real empowerment. That is why her work becomes collective, that is why other artists, other women, other beings identified with a more equitable and just world participate in it.

In a corner of the room, a closet. Ana De Orbegoso and Silvia Levenson take us inside a closet of empowerment. These artists invite us to come out of the closet empowered and without limitations, to seek authenticity and liberation.

Ana De Orbegoso makes use of symbolism to subvert social codes associated with women inscribed in current popular culture and plunges us into a closet full of affirmations and determinations for change. We wear a vest of power, we take the baton of change and we understand that it is possible.

Silvia Levenson uses glass not for its natural beauty, but for its storytelling potential and certainly to reveal things that are normally hidden. Glass becomes the ideal material to show the ambiguity of human relationships and the things that exist and are hidden behind the thousand folds of what we call reality.

A room open to contemporary art and bare, honest skin, without much to hide, which gives us the chance to contemplate and participate in the works being developed; it happens now, it is life, it is present and it makes us experience an experience to discover not what we put on top of our furniture, but what we carefully hide under our sheets.

Gabriela Rosso