Resurrecting only the skin, without the body that covers and belongs to it. Cristina Spinelli (Madrid, 1993) brings back to life the trimming of the drawing she made two years ago, with fire, on plasterboard walls, later repainted. The flourish burned into the wall was buried under the plastic paint; and now, the surfaces have been polished, the membranes have been torn from the plasterboard body and under the title of folus (aura) appear again like burnt clothes spread out on the floor. Like niches, like archaeological research plots. Archeology as scar.

Spinelli does not give up thinking about her artistic practice in terms of language. Plasterboard is important because it is a conjugation of different materials -paper, plaster, aluminum, fiberglass-. Intervening it, disintegrating it and recovering a language that had been hidden within means undoing a palimpsest and revealing a text that develops in an elliptical, umbelliferous way.

These skins stretched on the floor interpellate, morphologically, the layers of rice paper of umbela [umbel], the exhibition’s homonymous work that grows like a flower on the wall of the showroom joining fragments of clothing patterns. Again, a surface that emphasizes the absence of the body it clothes. We find it also in ◠◠ and ◡◡, the ceramic works made from the mold of the artist’s legs. In some we find wax that is sheltered in its concave part; in others, what is sheltered in the concavity are some wildflowers that Spinelli raided and preserved inside a book.

Because hiding and burying are forms of protection. A protection without guarantees. Like the nervous and erratic language that has freed itself from the compact homogeneity of plasterboard, Umbel·la [Umbel] as an exhibition shows us a nature that can no longer show itself or act as a block, with a certain consistency. It is in this sense that, sin título [untitled], it is shown to us spineless and worn out, and the binding that characterizes this object takes on a new grammar, emerging from the pages that hide it -like the flowers now in the ceramic pieces- to take on visibility.

A final characteristic of Umbel·la is viscerality, a certain melodramatic sense. Going all in, with everything, brutally. They are proposals made point-blank. Collapsing to rise again, like tus geranios con nosotras [your geraniums with us], a 2021 sculpture that now opens to show its insides. But the most ethereal works also show a certain fatigue or an emotional impact about to explode, like encender un fuego [light a fire], the sound work that fills the room with the sound of castanets; or last, the projection that is there and is not there, waiting for someone to give it support to manifest itself. And also Daniel, the spoon suspended in the air. One last umbel, umbrella, about to fall. About to lose.

In Umbel·la nothing ends in a painful result, but it does end at the limit of outburst.

Cristina Spinelli's artistic practice unfolds from a profound relationship with materials. Her work reveals a kind of modus operandi that allows her to (re)conjugate the meanings inherent to materialities in order to construct new narratives, languages and codes. Her works present an exercise in research and experimentation sustained over time, through which the artist fantasises about the possibility of discovering and manifesting inherent properties that constitute the materials with which she comes into contact.   

A particular fascination with disappearance leads Spinelli to relate to materials and processes that will eventually disappear. Wax, a substance intended to be replaced by nobler materials, is rescued and then moulded with heat, giving it a new body that embraces other objects; fire, instead of destroying, blisters the wall, thus tracing and raising the scar of the shadow of an old piece, making it mutate into new forms; resin and fibreglass impregnate paper to dilute an already unfocused image, which now resists in a translucent trace. We find in these processes a continuous gesture that hides reminiscences of objects that have accompanied the artist throughout her life. Because some of them, as they wear out or even disappear, manage to remain in images and impressions, which Spinelli traces in her work.  

Que me entierren con todo is a game of layering that is articulated from presence and absence. The works that inhabit the gallery space have accompanied the works throughout the process their making. Spinelli moulds and tears, again and again, to get to the root, dissect and (re)construct, unveiling the physical and symbolic. This accompaniment becomes a spiral in which works, materials, shadows and images meet and separate, appear and disappear, reference each other, crawl, affect each other.

A slimy, glistening image zooms in and out at levels that would be impossible for the human eye to capture. Later we will perceive that this rugged violet field corresponds to the approach of the bodies that we will find in our path. The bodies of some images that have changed shape, showing and altering a text: the digital code has become physical, thus has generated a mountain of papers that have become a thick conglomerate full of nuances and disjointed characters. Some scattered ponds contain and condense infinite variable alterations, lexical fragments that make us move between the natural and the artificial: patterns of flower petals that are repeated, phantasmagoria in dried orchids and in sugar-frosted violets, corncobs and a bunch of tangles that are nothing more than bugs that come from machines that create objects. A writing climbs like a garden through an ancient architectural ornament keeping its shape, and a small forest of corncobs grow through the artifice of its own tissue.

In the final decades of the 20th century, the great ideological narratives of Modernity came to an end; the certainty of notions such as truth, progress and identity were called into question. A multiplicity of new voices appeared to make collective histories more complex, speaking out for those little stories that had been hidden on the underside of History. The working classes, racialised bodies, women, diverse genders, and others have seen and see how the acquisition of rights also means a narrative control open to infinite possibilities.

This exhibition is porous and flexible. It is an ornament that articulates through the materialities that define objects, a multilayer body that is not codified and which gathers the imagination of the artefact's memory.

Romantic Bullets Position Effectively is an exhibition that emerges from the confluence of desire and intuition. A succession of elastic gestures imprecisely connect one twist to another from the works and artists that are part of the exhibition. The notion of “twist”, in English, appeared early in the process, remaining present and acquiring body over time by paying attention to an anecdotal image: the memory of a twisted ice cream that still exists but has disappeared. As a fleeting object, this ice cream brings forth a material torsion that melts but cannot be satisfactorily untangled. This material paradox includes the twisted within the twist, enveloping a concept with a transitory image.

Thanks to a methodology based on connections and sensitive findings Romantic Bullets Position Effectively begins to come to life with Ran Zhang’s Resolution of Traits 3, where the artist builds fictitious objects around a protein structure to show a molecular reality that cannot be seen but needs a visual experience to be understood. Ran is interested in the motor proteins that are responsible for converting chemical energy into mechanical work within many organisms, allowing us not only to move, but also to see. From this work I invite Cristina Spinelli with her piece Untitled, which proposes a material journey back and forth through the corn plant. It is detached from its “original” body to become bioplastic and acquire again aesthetic qualities and vegetal patterns. The continuous serialization and reproducibility, characteristic of industrial processes, are also part of what we call nature, making use of the planet as a great laboratory of “the artificial”. Palais, by Alex Reynolds, unfolds the project towards the endless and alienating material dimension of bureaucracy. Through a series of clandestine forays into the enormous and disturbing Palais de Justice in Brussels, Alex documents in first person the intricacies, the ruins, the elevators, corridors and different floors of a building as labyrinthine as it is spectral. It both contains and conceals the ordinary reality of bureaucracy within the imposing symbolic and effective power of institutional architecture. Nora Aurrekoetxea’s Besoa, Klit, Lepokoa and Trentza come together in Romantic Bullets Position Effectively to stop without concluding an intuitive drift of gestures and twists connected through the presence and constituent materiality of the works. Nora’s four braided pieces produce stable forms for the intimacy of gestures that arise from the habit of the provisional and perishable. Creating a system of relationships that also includes the continuous exchanges between the natural and the artificial, both in their form and material qualities, Besoa, Klit, Lepokoa and Trentza return to the initial impulse of this intuitive curatorial process of gestures and indirect organic links that suggests a circular structure for other possible directions.

Una bruma vaporosa lo inunda todo. En su condensación muta para transformarse en pequeños cristales. Se precipitan, se derraman y se deslizan sobre los cauces que brotan del metal. El flujo se expande en una dimensión sonora para envolver de nuevo todo el espacio. Entonces la gota salta. Salpica el surco de piedra. Son ahora lágrimas metálicas que nos brindan resonancias originarias como si nos trasladaran a los comienzos de nuestra historia. Así, llegamos al lugar donde empezó todo. La fuente es el origen: un organismo vivo que fluye en repetición constante. Crecen flores blancas que algún día volverán a ser fluido recordando su pasado. Un cuerpo viscoso y azul se eleva monumentalmente. Se desliza hacia abajo atravesado por la gravedad. Otras gotas han caído encima de un cuerpo blanco y pulido, las envuelve en su cristalización.

Ni memoria de forma se configura como un cuerpo arqueológico vivo que sigue sus propios procesos cíclicos de transformación de la materia. Algunas obras son los restos de dichos procesos, otras son los procesos vivos en sí mismos: flujos circulatorios en movimiento. Son cuerpos no humanos, receptáculos de materia que cuentan historias a través de sus significados y significantes.

The swimming pool is defined by its depth, as a longing or a residual trace of fire that reflects traces of previous figures. Cristina Spinelli develops an installation in the form of an expanded drawing that ironizes the impossibility of combustion in water. The smoke trace gains a three-dimensional effect and materiality that, through oxygen, generates mirages from the interior. From the outside, the deformity is added to it, which, together with the current, helps to mask the shadow.

Clusters of children's life jackets float on the drawing, almost completely filled with water, exerting a force towards the depth, resulting in a sculpture that only shows a small portion of its volume on the surface, like an iceberg that is not clear on the benefit of staying afloat. Alfredo Rodríguez manifests in these pieces his relationship with the body through sculpture. The life jackets embrace each other, forming a body in itself, half-submerged and wandering with the viewer.

In its seventh year as an independent project, Gresite resumes its proposal after a year's hiatus, joining forces with Estudio Jardín with the intention of continuing a project whose focus is exclusively on the artist and how to translate the exhibition exercise into new spatial proposals, establishing a direct relationship between the works and a non-neutral environment.

La Sala de Arte Joven presenta la XXXII edición de los Circuitos de Artes Plásticas de la Comunidad de Madrid, con los trabajos de los artistas seleccionados en la última edición de esta convocatoria pública, que concede ayudas a la producción y difusión de sus obras a diez creadores menores de 35 años residentes en la región.