ANA LAURA ALÁEZ

I AM A PALACE / I AM A STABLE

26.04.2024 – 1.09.2024

A ROW OF BETRAYALS, 2024

ESPARTO

The way in which we all individually position ourselves with respect to art may be an acid test for interpersonal relations, but over time it is the artwork itself that not only attests to what we can each provide but also reveals its ties with the world.

In the process of creating and correcting a sculpture, one acts like a dancer practising a move: the action of modifying and redoing makes up a large part of the whole business. Hilera de traiciones adds personal crises and collapses as an additional sort of material that becomes more or less evident. Clamouring dark thoughts appear tangentially to draw spatial events repeated over the course of many moments, with unpredictable consequences that have gradually left their mark. The real pulse in this sculpture is a memory: a clear childhood image of a silent woman with bare hands using a fistful of esparto to polish the metal on a wood-burning kitchen stove. Whenever she scratched the surface, another louder, wilder, nonhuman voice would ring out until the eagerly awaited shiny metal began to appear at the end of a long process of grinding away. What was once perceived as a harsh experience has now mutated into these plaited strands of hair. Seeing golden hair where the body once toiled. Recalling something too raw to grasp at the time. Then it was rejection; now it is riches. This humble action contained two ideas also found in artistic practice: redemption and sacrifice.

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THE CONFLICT IS ANOTHER ONE, 2018

INFINITE TIMES THE SAME PLACE, 2024

ESPARTO

A kind of ancestral mask, with orifices or perforations and the fragile links of its internal and external relations. An irregular network based on repetition, on turning horizontal into vertical, on conjuring three dimensions out of a plane, on writing a biographical story, on the action of rising up regardless of circumstances—and always stressing the inconclusive nature of structures and the impossibility of ever reaching any certainty. The pierced holes—a repeated and recurring feature since the very start of the oeuvre—become a symbol of slipping with friction. The rough, raw, practically untreated esparto, earthy in colour, worked by hand, has echoes of a more atavistic culture. The vernacular or native aspects hint at the achronological, the simultaneous, the eternal, obsessive return to the same subjects and thoughts.

A duplicated work, a synchronised presentation of different versions separated in time. Doubles and repetitions, Janus’s two faces on the one same body. If this Roman god’s distinctive features reveal a multiple nature in every person—as a door (inside/outside), as a key (open/closed) and as a transition (beginning/end)—then these two sculptures open up a void in the museum space. Binary natures have often been symbolised by two heads looking in opposite directions. The gates of the Temple of Janus were opened in times of war and closed in times of peace. Here there are also glimpses of a metaphor about an artist’s visibility: not their social visibility but how they let themself be seen on their own terms, beyond the ephemeral, through something material. A gateway that both welcomes and expels at the same time.

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I AM A PALACE / I AM A STABLE, 2024

ESPARTO AND IRON CHAINS

The title of this piece might almost be a kind of enigmatic aside at the start of an autobiographical book. Or perhaps a prompt to make phrases out of opposites that anyone might share, in endless permutations beyond the first person singular: “You lead an apparently happy life in a safe place, while others strut around their bleak wasteland” or “Now lazing about in your mansion, but a moment ago rolling around in the stables”. This might be a reference to where this sculpture is housed, harking back to earlier stages that are hard to express—when a work is yet to be brought into existence but there is already a specific space in mind—or even to the moment when excuses run out and you have to get down to work: you simply stoop and swallow your pride.

Soy Palacio / Soy Establo could well sum up the course of an artist’s private and artistic life, what it means to leap from one extreme to the other and the tension created in the process. A constant loss of objectivity, an ugly side that no-one wants to face and yet also an awareness of the importance of getting whatever it might be across in one way or another. The final result comes from dedicating oneself to art without shying away from the inherent contradictions involved.

The pieces of esparto might bring to mind a bust of a woman, an unfinished spiral, a fragment of some recognisable part of the body. But the real drive behind this work was plotting a kind of bas-relief that would, in turn, lose none of the initial urge that enabled it to be worked on without abandoning its almost blind impulse. A Gestalt drawing like the rooftops crowning a magical Etruscan necropolis, its nine cones an analogy of an unstable or perishable refuge: cabin, hut or shack. And, in contrast, a network of chains as a supporting structure for what now also looks like a series of udders as well. A kind of wall, almost invisible, made out of links, somewhere between shiny and opaque, like an essay written on two sides of a sheet of paper, huge in size, vastly spatial, with different scripts vying for attention and all possible antonyms drifting from one side to another, out towards the edges, with its hollows and other, wilder traces. The materialised bellowings of a beast that would have us believe it is tamer than it really is.

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I AM A PALACE / I AM A STABLE (FIRST APPROACH), 2024

INKJET PRINT ON ILFORD GALERIE PRESTIGE SMOOTH COTTON RAG PAPER

Here we see sculpture and body in the same shot, the person as a bearer of sculpture, the continuation of a tradition in classical sculpture based on the corporeal, now embracing contemporary ideas and materials. An arm reaches out like a tree branch, holding aloft a model of the sculpture Soy Palacio / Soy Establo as a two-dimensional starting point of the exhibition. The sturdy appearance of a flesh-and-bones extremity on a 1:1 scale evokes an artist’s legitimate power over their work as it emerges from its secluded life, yet to be made public and when the idea (or rather the desire) to shape an impetus is still beating strong in the best possible place, where weakness could be a synonym of strength. This fragment of contemporary sculpture calls for new mythological tales: there is a growing tension between the fragile sculpture and the human form which acts here as a retaining wall. It appears to be saying: “This far but no further” or “You will never see what surrounds this image”. There is the sense that sooner or later this link will be reversed: the hanging mesh will slowly grow stronger and stronger to gain the upper hand in its relationship with the body, which will get weaker and weaker, transforming itself until it dutifully slips into another dimension.

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