Advertisements
[ad_1]
Undress to dress. Take off your shoes to come into contact with the earth. Wearing a tunic that is also painting (and organic cotton painted with natural dyes). These are the first steps we take before literally entering Turkish and ancientthe enormous cushion – the term belongs to its author – with which belen rodriguez (Valladolid, 1981) escaped the verticality of the stretcher to expand towards the horizontal.
do this in a careful dialogue with the Chapel of the Counts of Saldaña del Patio Herreriano Museum, intimidated, perhaps, by the very majesty of that stone architecture that has its echo in this marble surface. When walking and sinking our feet into it, the sensory sensation triggers, almost as if we were sliding on the wet sand of the seashore, while we look at the discreet swirls of color in each of the remnants that make up the piece.
Advertisements
Belén Rodríguez manages, once again, to turn everyday life into something poetic with calm, uneventful work that takes advantage of and feeds on what is around it. has maintained over the years a common aestheticbased – we could say – on pausing, on letting things happen, paying attention to the small details that end up building the greatness of your work.
The artist establishes a careful dialogue with the Chapel of the Counts of Saldaña, intimidated, perhaps, by the very majesty of that stony architecture
His technique was refined, becoming increasingly engaged, transforming everyday life – concerns about waste, the use of natural materials – into politics. We see this clearly in the material he filled his installation with, biodegradable cork powder for bottles, and in the selection of eleven works in the room next to the chapel, all of them recent.
[The origin of the Patio Herreriano: how it was how some entrepreneurs formed a museum collection]
In this space, the colors of the large backdrop tell us of an inverted mountain landscape, the one you see every day from the window of your small isolated cabin in the Cantabrian mountains. A format, that of the curtain, that he has already experimented with on other occasions and that we inevitably associate with his work. I think, for example, of how he covered the elevators in the CA2M in I want to look like night.
Advertisements
Its other hallmark is color, which took a 180º turn after passing through the Alhambra Awards. Then he definitively abandoned bleach and trained in the art of natural dyeing, with the materials that nature gave him back. The work resulting from this call, back page (2021), can be seen in this exhibition, 30 pages bound in fabric.
Since then, he has not worked otherwise. The clothes we wore just now are made with natural dyes from “neighboring plants”. Or the piece you are presenting now in another exhibition, Hail my loves! at the Collegium (Arévalo), he tells us about the forest in front of his house.
Outside the room, their work is displayed in a showcase. workbooks. In them, he carefully notes each step he takes. He talks about engraving, the process that is done to make the color last on the fabric, the hours it soaks, how it dries and the changes he notices in the color. Eucalyptus leaves, pomegranate peels and avocado are some of its raw materials.
Follow the topics that interest you