one skin for everything
There was no surface that wasn'tshattered in the kaleidoscopeand the eye of the image continuesbeing what you can see
Júlia de Carvalho Hansen in Sap, Poison or Fruit.
In her first solo exhibition, Bárbara Paz brings to Alfinete Galeria an installation executed after an immersive period of research and artistic residencies held in Argentina, in 2021. The title Um Pele para tudo refers to an excerpt from the book Junco, by the plastic artist and writer Nuno Ramos, whom Bárbara invites for a dialogue with materiality and memory through the articulation of a thought about layers, plots, textures, skins and structures.
Contrary to the excess of superpositions present on the surfaces of the chassis or objects of her previous works, in this new situation presented to the public, the artist proposes new configurations for the visual object. What was once a surface seems to have been torn apart in space so that we can see its architecture as if under a microscope. A painting chassis has its structure covered with vegetable thorns and nets made by the artist are bathed in pitch and resin. These elements, along with burnt tree trunks and delicate black plush inserts, form a dialogue with the architecture of the gallery. Between full and empty, between what is soft or soft, hard, rough or threatening, our body is invited to go through memories of multiple experiences of contact with exteriority. What could be perceived as ruined matter is redrawn in the gallery in an organic, anti-systemic and erotic movement. The living invades all matter through the look, through the memory of touch and time of those who encounter it.
Epecuén, the place where Bárbara held her first artistic residency during the pandemic, was an Argentine summer village situated around a salt lake south of Buenos Aires. In 1985, a strong storm caused a dam to burst, flooding everything and leaving the city submerged in this lake with salinity ten times greater than that of the oceans. It is said that during the catastrophe, residents tried to recover their possessions using fishing nets, in vain. The heavy, corrosive water covered everything in white and the only living things seen frequently are flamingos that feed on a single microorganism that survives in salt water. Today the water has receded and what you can see is a ghost town. A map, streets of whitewashed ruins, the salty skin of the remaining matter and the lake where the living body never sinks.
A skin for everything seeks to exercise our gaze on the ambivalence present in the cycles of matter and constructive gestures of culture and language. Impermanence would not, therefore, be an end point. Space is opened for the infinite and indefinite form of things in metamorphosis. Between falling asleep and germinating, containing and spilling, lifting and floating; everything seems to seek to reconfigure itself where it is not possible to create a fixed image for a choreography of the future.
Yana Tamayo
