Maider Aldasoro is the curator of the exhibition hArrApAtu, featuring three artists whose names begin with the letter A: Andrea Berbois, Adrián Irisarri and Ángela Rodríguez. The gallery text suggests self-portraiture as a presentation before the other, through desire and seduction.

Andrea appears at the exhibition to give a concert at the opening, and another before it ends. The live performance is built up of layers and fragments: loops over which voice and violin are superimposed, leaving certain melodies floating, such as the Agurra. The concert helps to gather the audience around a happening. But it also pulls in a series of conventions which remain intact: the separation between performer and audience, a beginning and an end, applause. This faithfulness towards the format paradoxically breaks down the expectation that the artist will remain throughout the exhibition. Andrea appears for as long as the concert lasts. She appears at the concert, disappears from the exhibition.

An aquamarine green dress of Ángela’s lies on the floor while Andrea plays the violin. The cadence of the loops and the way the dress falls give the image the maritime air of a port. The bust of the dress protrudes from the floor, raising up the absent body in a slight arc and drawing in such images as the arch of hysteria or the dead Ophelia, floating with her mouth half open. Sex and death appear here in the best way possible, through torsion. The polyester fabric is full of burns that resemble furrows, turning it into a deformed plastic skin. Being undone and at the same time protuberant, it generates an intermittent presence laden with sentiment.

Around it, Ángela also presents numerous drawings and a number of paintings. The placement of the drawings – torn from notebooks, post-its and loose sheets of paper – alongside the paintings reproduces a known narrative: that of the artist who turns thoughts or notes into works of another category. This arrangement brings in a sense of distance. Before addressing the lines, we already presuppose a singularity.

In one of them we see the note: Destroy the form to make room for ourselves. It is a happy coincidence that the dress, ruined by the burns, is ultimately the object that embodies this phrase. It remains available once we free ourselves of the artist’s intentions to negotiate with the object’s biography. We can then enter within, imagine or remember with it, without the need to reconstruct how it arrived at this point.

Adrián appears with two large images. One of a Romanesque church, a low-angle, backlit view, takes up one of the walls. Strips of transparent adhesive tape glaze its surface. Nearby, a canvas with a life-size image of the artist hangs from the ceiling by a precarious structure: a rope supports a chain, the chain has a pole held to it by zip ties, with bulldog clips lastly hanging the canvas from the pole.

They are accompanied by construction materials, furniture from the seventies and a nativity scene. The artist arranges them as a diorama, shifting the installation in the direction of the applied arts. When taken out of context, though, the objects construct a scaffolding which embraces and even overprotects the images. Without them, the images would have a touch of nakedness and the immediacy of a punk song: a landscape and a person, with no protection beyond their own presence. They come towards you.

On leaving the exhibition someone comments: “I kind of got the impression: here is my cock”. The observation pinpoints a risk derived from the frontal attitude with which the artist presents himself. But it is not enough to reduce it to such a reading. The canvas says other things as well: here is my youth, here is my beauty, this is my size, I want to see myself through you. Adrián does not present his body as an outcome. He leaves it there. Available. The mirror does not last long. Pay attention, stay alert, work for it.

 

hArrApAtu

Andrea Berbois
Adrián Irisarri
Ángela Rodríguez

Mediation: Maider Aldasoro Diaz

ALONDEGIA KULTUR ETXEA

Zumaia