HIGHLY SENSITIVE MATERIAL
I want to make something beautiful — beautiful in the way things are beautiful when they do not need an explanation; when they simply are. Like in 2012, before I had started studying art, when I didn’t ask myself so many questions.
I wonder why beauty makes me melancholic. A year ago I read a piece of news — and by “reading the news” I mean that I read a headline — about an English woman who rescued a hedgehog from the street. When it didn’t eat or drink, she became worried and took it to the vet. It wasn’t a hedgehog. It was a wool pom-pom. Still, she decided to take it back home with her. I was cloudy for a day and a half.
It frustrates me to think that what I consider beautiful is outside construct. I want to know the truth. In case that exists. It bothers me that I like brutalist architecture, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or Dalí (I mean the artist — the paintings seem horrible to me). I still don’t like matcha, though. Years ago I saw that in Boston there was a group of people protesting against Renoir; they spoke of a saccharine, diabetic quality that is so extreme it could be described as “aesthetic terrorism “🔥. It still makes me laugh. I also like Matisse, and after seven attempts or more I finally managed to read A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Every woman needs a room of her own and money. In the book, Jane Austen is mentioned — and reading her never cost me any effort. Mark fucking Twain said that any library that contained Jane Austen was a terrible one. He made me doubt, and that enraged me. Every woman needs a room of her own, money — and to know how to fix a leaking tap.
This work emerges as a reflection articulated through different notions within the history of art, approached through the use of personal objects—objects that operate as time indicators, objects that intersect with class and gender -objects, objects OBJECTS! - within an interest in challenging different formats such as painting, sculpture, and performance.
About Labubus and Stanley cups 💐 , I like to speculate whether any of these mass-produced objects will have value in a far future , or whether they will be nothing more than a piece of trash on one of those plastic islands. I wonder if they will become objects that illustrate the shame of an absurd society — displayed in a museum with the same sensation as those instruments of torture from the Inquisition. I wonder whether anyone will know that Carmen was extremely happy when she bought her Stanley Cup for 55 euros at Urban Outfitters. They won't know that I went to the gym for four months and that I loved taking those selfies with that stupid thermos that weighs more than two kilos and that I couldn’t carry in my bag because it leaked.
Photos: Soline Bedel
