LALIRIO by Fuentesal Arenillas, curated by Claudia Elies, is an exhibition structured around an accumulation of textile pieces, arranged between pillars and glass panels like a large backbone. The work carried out by the artists has been filtered over the years, forming ways of understanding sculptural practice as a collective learning process adapted to a constant loss of form.
The exhibition is divided into two levels: on the ground floor, Carrusel unfolds, while on the first floor we encounter Imaginaria and Caracolas. Across the three installations, there is an elastic mode of making that returns again and again to that small theatre of drifts, where necks cross with waists and cuffs with feet, sustaining the movement of the one beside them and letting hands glide in flight over the materials that have continually driven them toward action and event. It is a construction where there is not always a clear story, but rather narratives and tales that intertwine, intersect, and repeat as the forms stretch, rest, and disappear.
Carrusel is a correspondence between Fuentesal Arenillas and artist Itziar Okariz—an epistolary relationship between Cádiz, Madrid, and New York that materializes in a multitude of garment-letters. The works respond to the desire to bring their artistic practices closer, to seek through them new structures, to find other ways of speaking to one another through the physical. Itziar Okariz has explored different ways of activating these materials, producing at the same time a video archive of all these exercises, performed alone, with her daughter Izar, or with her students.
The conversations between them are exercises in proximity—approaching one another, finding a shared place; but they are also a friendship, a seed carried by a bird, a waltz on the estuary, an accumulation of gestures, or a shift of axis in order to do a handstand in a skirt. A wardrobe for everyone that searches in —and through— new structures where shared interests emerge and give shape to the installation.
Imaginaria is built from an accumulation of traces that repeat and pile up to generate a new material arrangement. Fuentesal Arenillas collect, cut, and transport all those memories from the years they have shared, which remain adhered to these hardboard panels that once formed the floors of their studios, producing an archive of uncontrolled forms. A palimpsest intervened by nature without restraint, opening a path toward new readings shaped by more than seventy stretchers that give form to the work. Each one documents specific ways of being present and acting by those who were there.
For this occasion, they have invited artist LUCE to contribute a new gaze and reading, helping to broaden these layers of memory. It is a work of tracing that communicates, connects, and weaves narratives of other forms of intimacy, turning the everyday into a shared stage.
Based on the same patterns and cuts as the signature garments that make up Carrusel, a series of new variations has been created: Caracolas. Produced specifically for the LALIRIO exhibition, the artists express a dynamic of multiple transformations and imbalances in which there is no final position. Articulated in space, they are in a state of rest, accompanying each other with different loads and tensions. These pieces suggest other forms of waiting, other gaps, and other ways of perceiving new movements. Gestures that refer both to the word and to the volume that yields with use and that, over time, facilitates posture, stretching, or character, managing to enter and exit its covering, sliding through the fullness and emptiness of the surface that falls under its own weight. Thank you for viewing.
The exhibition unfolds in the same way as the flowers of a sea lily, which emerge each day and accumulate alongside others, creating a new order. The pieces on display are capable of changing without losing their original form, of becoming something else without ceasing to be what they are.