- Artist
- Violeta Mayoral
- Dates
- —
- Curated by
- Martina Millà
Violeta Mayoral (Almeria, 1988) grew up in the Tabernas desert, a harsh environment that educated her gaze. For this reason, the artist knows well what it means to live out in the open. Her eyes can recognize the particular nature of a landscape that wavers between absence and the search for boundaries that define-maybe only as a vain attempt-the immensity of that space and its horizon.
In this selection of photographs-most of which convey low temperatures, were taken at dusk or at times of low luminosity-, we find elements that can both open or close a space or dissolve its boundaries and contours. Mayoral photographs places that might seem hostile, places where time has been suspended, a time that does not seem to exist and that the locations do not allow to situate or signify. Such absence of points of reference provokes estrangement as it does not allow the viewer to hold on to anything. There is neither situation nor meaning. At the same time, however, there are elements that help the viewer establish certain limits: the sea as a wall, an impenetrable garden hedge, the effect of the camera flash on a surface that transforms into something rigid.
After all, there is also an attempt to find refuge amidst such hostility through beauty. Even if the environment appears unfavorable, unsafe, precarious, the artist finds a way of turning it into a refuge. Perhaps such obstacles allow for a time of rest and contemplation while we keep searching for an expectation, for the results of a promise that is passed on from generation to generation and that is never quite realized: the promise as something external and illusory and the gaze as a threshold, both surrounding the subject and their inner self, their solitude out in the open.
