Three lines drawn on a piece of glass form a cross, presenting the artists involved in the exhibition: Andrea Aguilera, Gabriele Muguruza and Carmen Valero. The intersection of three axes is typically used to represent a spatial dimension. The title, 3,600 Cubic Metres, also refers to the volume of a space, its capacity to be filled or emptied.

The works appear scattered at different heights and distances. They address the uses of space, exploring them as passageway, entrance, room or stairway. Two of Andrea’s sculptures accompany the lamps which light the passageway; another surrounds the pillar. Two of Gabriele’s drawings are positioned alongside the building’s signage; another, next to the plant decorating the entrance hall. A drawing by Carmen appears on the stairway leading up to the library; others, on the way down to the basement. These relationships generate subjective re-framings, fragment the perception of space, and enable routes that differ from those established by architecture.

Spaces become places because we inhabit them. A clock produces nothing more than a shared abstraction, a set of lines ordering time. And yet we come here at a specific moment: to play, to exercise, to read a book or meet a friend for coffee. While time may be beyond our grasp, we have come here today at a specific moment, to see an exhibition.

Time also means being an artist and being here, wanting something. Time is wanting to show ourselves in a particular way: we do so, or our subconscious does so, in connection with the past and the future. The fact that Gabriele placed a huge wooden board alongside the pelota court, or that Carmen created a large-scale mural, expresses a desire for presence: to occupy a time and place in a specific manner, to show oneself, albeit unconsciously, by reference to the past and the future.

A floor sculpture by Andrea presents greater material complexity than the other works in the exhibition. A metal Möbius strip lies on a wooden board, the strip plaited in rope, to create the appearance of a curved spine. At one end, two small sheets of paper lie on the board. The abstract nature of the procedure becomes figurative because of the sculpture’s superconscious awareness of itself. There is little space between what it wants to be and what it is. Knowing that it is a sculpture, its material configurations seem to respond solely to this desire to be so.

An engraving by Gabriele is dramatically lit against one of the walls. Small circles have been embossed on rectangular engraving paper. The engraving is framed by a black card, with microperforated plastic within. It is lit expressively by a spotlight, shaded by a tube of black card. As you approach it is impossible to see the image, as the white on white of the embossing becomes black on black because of the shadow of the body itself. The piece forces a slight representational failure: not being able to see something as subtle as a relief of circles, not because of excess light but excess shadow. The experience gives rise to an entertaining frustration; intention collapses, and a game of displacements arises, between format, light and substrate.

Gabriele has another two engravings in the exhibition, two wood cuts in which coloured circles dance around a sharp diagonal. Once again, the focus is on the edges of the substrate. The wood used to create the black in the print has rounded edges, the background layer is straight, the mount and the frame also straight. I intuit Gabriele’s intention to work with the typical procedures associated with fine art. This use of the commonplace generates a visible sense in the work, in contrast with a certain contemporary trend to give meaning to the artistic aspect through a distinctive narrative in the process.

Gabriele has also installed a large wooden board painted in bright blue and supported against a wall near the pelota court, which also has blue stripes. The sculpture seems to have been made shortly before the opening; it is freshly painted, with drips along the edges. This is an expressive gesture: a response to something that seems to be missing in the exhibition with something more naked and striking. This resembles the use of the spotlight, and also the way in which Gabriele uses wax crayons in her drawings, with the oiliness of the wax causing the geometrical structure to overflow, like an unconscious element spilling through the holes in the system governing it.

In response to the containment of some of the works in the exhibition, Carmen has produced two mural drawings as a point of escape. The first, the drawing of a face on the other side of the stairway, triggers the consensual pleasure of intervening in architecture by using human figures. The second, abstract form, traces a few lines on one of the walls, merging in with the room’s cracks and stains. It functions like light glistening on water: the subtlety of the representation generates a tenuous superposition which reveals the surface. The proposal continues the approaches of Raúl Domínguez in exhibitions such as

Media hora de sol (Carreras Mugica, 2022), where the use of graphite and yellow pencil also generated this type of surface vibration.

The mural intervention coexists with other drawings no larger than a folded sheet of paper. Set against them, it seems large and public, while the others are small and domestic. A temporal scale opens up between them, as if one could say: I can be here, like this, because I was previously there.

 

3.600m3

Andrea Aguilera
Gabriele Muguruza
Carmen Valero

 

Mediación: Maite Choya

 

ZELAIETA ZENTROA

Amorebieta-Etxano