VÉASE IBÍD. – ALMUDENA LOBERA

MainRoom

September – October, 2018

«Véase ibíd.» refers us to the thing immediately previous and invites us to look attentively at it. Maybe it’s something that we just observed on the street, or something we were thinking about a minute ago, before arriving at the gallery. Ibíd. seems to tell us: the accumulation of everything we see, what we read, what we do, can vanish or can be art. The key, as in all the work of the Spanish artist Almudena Lobera, is in perception.

Upon entering the exhibition, we are received by a space deliberately unsaturated. In the center of the room a letter seems to be the only piece exposed. The letter is one of several sent from the tomb of the French author Georges Perec to all the neighbors who currently live in the building in Paris, where he wrote the book Species of Spaces. Along with French artist Margaux Bricler, Lobera sent the same page where Perec left his address, specifying not only his street and city, but the country, the planet and finally the Universe. The letters, which do not wait for an answer, have been manufactured as a subtle tribute that may perhaps awaken a succession of actions that we will never know about.

The attentive viewer will quickly discover a peculiarity in the room. There are written sentences above the skirting board. This transfer of the work from the traditional height of the eyes to a few centimeters above ground level, forces us to look towards a normally overlooked place. The footnotes, have been extracted from books where they are nothing but dispensable clarifications that complement the text. This decontextualization turns them into slightly cryptic protagonists to be interpreted by the public. In this way, the everyday places of the gallery architecture become the canvas of the artist.

The second part of the exhibition is discovered when we turn around in the direction of the door through which we entered. We are then with two pieces that act as hard drives of visual memory. A fragment of a Greek sculpture’s face, who observes us through disposable contact lenses used by the artist for a month. Those lenses have stored thirty unrepeatable days of Lobera’s vision, they have worked as small circular sieves filtering reality from her eyes. And now they look at us, transparent, from the inanimate and white coldness.

Finally, a brief chronological axis composed of seven mirrors in different degrees of deterioration, with the most decayed specimens becoming transparent again. Mirrors that have stored thousands of reflections throughout their useful life and that now lose them when they lose their chromium paint. We decide which images to save, put in writing, remember, share, but still the time will come to let them go. And perhaps «in the same place», in the same universe, someone refers to us with a «See ibíd.».

Isabel Abascal