nataliadomínguez

ABRIR LA BOCA BIEN GRANDE, CERRAR EL PUÑO BIEN FUERTE [To widely open your mouth, to strongly close your fist]

From May, 13th to July 15th, 2023
Arranz Bravo Foundation
L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona (Spain)

Read the text of the exhibition here

The title of the exhibition refers to the involuntary reflex human beings show during free fall. At this moment, our arms stretch out, our hands close in an attempt to hold on to whatever element that can keep us stable and our mouth open to scream out or inhale of fear.

Abrir la boca bien grande, cerrar el puño bien fuerte brings together a series of works that take as starting point different devices for protection and survival in the aerial environment, such as parachutes, harnesses and high-altitude flight suits. Objects that show how our relationship with the landscape is totally conditioned by the infinite number of tools we insatiably produce, proposing themselves as mediating entities between our bodies and the environment that surrounds us.

The entities are shown nullified of their function as they are hooked on a series of solid structures of a utilitarian nature, which delimit their forms, uses and disuses. As a whole, the sculptures generate a transitory scene, moment or situation - as if something has happened or is about to happen - in which each object is shown incapable of inhabiting the operative heroism of its own function. Thus, a space is produced in which the viewer can enter and experience the ways in which the human body shapes the ‘things’ of the world and vice versa.

La imposibilidad de atrapar una nube
[The impossibility of catching a cloud]
Audiovisual essay
HD Video
11 ́08 ́ ́
2020

While reading Kassel does not invite to logic, Enrique Vila-Matas rambles on the artistic panorama, the “lost in translation”, the free interpretation and mentions the figure of the clouds twice. One of the comments that attracted me the most was the following:

The subject of the clouds was actually exhausted by a friend of mine from Barcelona, who one day found himself next to me in the cinema watching white little clouds crossing behind the Capitol of Washington in a film by Otto Preminger. I never saw anyone more focused on one of the millions of useless facts of the past, never anyone in a movie theater so immobilized, so still, so literally in the clouds as my friend was that day.

From the whole book I decided to keep the most banal and useless data. And, in my case, I wanted to take uselessness to the extreme: I wanted to catch a cloud.

This image and text composition starts from the romantic idea of catching a cloud to finally question the complex relation we develop with some specific materialities that can be seen but never touched.

Maxi K-FLEX FC0-10 VAR#1
Different thicknesses pipe insulation, PVC tubes, ropes and ratchets.
240 x 270 x 250 cm
2022

This big-dimension sculpture, made of pipe insulation and PVC tubes, is part of the exhibition Una forma incontrolable [An indomitable form], 2022. In my search for different kinds of human technification and submission of the landscape, the dimension and uses of the materials in each work of the exhibition obey to absent bodies, in a wish to show different ways we practice the space.

This artwork concentrates in the material that covers the pipes of the buildings, those elements hidden behind dropped ceilings and drywalls that, like our arteries, help the proper functioning of edifices by transporting fluid materials such as gas or liquids.

My decision to focus on the insulation instead of the pipes is part of my search for “shapeless” materials. Because pipe insulation are, in fact, amorphous materials that need others to define themselves.

The title of this work responds to the logic of the self-nomenclature used in mass produced materials. While K-FLEX FC0-10 responds to the real code printed on the material (its industrial name), here Maxi refers to its dimension and VAR#1 indicates the order in the series. Therefore, the textual contribution printed on the surface of the object acts as a conceptual exercise, merging its physicality, meaning and image.

ST (Parachute) III
Reflective fabric, plastic, rope, carabiners, zipper, keychain holders, methacrylate elements and chrome plated iron structure on wall.
120 x 30 x 20 cm 2023

ST (Parachute) II
Reflective fabric, plastic, elastic cord, carabiners, keychain holders and methacrylate elements.
450 x 175 cm
2023

Arnés
[Harness]
Reflective fabric, plastic, foam, rope, elastic cord, carabiners, zipper, keychain holders, plastic buckle, methacrylate elements and chrome plated iron structure.
115 x 75 x 40 cm
2023

ST (Parachute) I
Reflective fabric, plastic, rope, carabiners, turnbuckles and chorme plated iron structure on wall.
245 x 140 x 90 cm
2022

Natalia Domínguez explores from the installation and the object the notion of landscape, understanding it as a by-product of human activity. In this case she focuses on the cloud as an element of the landscape to insist on the formal and conceptual possibilities of abstract materialities, the corporeality of which resists to be domesticated. It is precisely this resistance that interests her: elements that are apparently impossible to trap physically. With ST (parachute) I she has found in the fall a form of liberation from material as well as meaning. ST (parachute) I is a parachute that has lost its function by being hooked to a structure. The shapes of the bags and the folds of the fabric refer to the rounded and pompous body of a cloud, an element that we cannot seem to contain.

Its gesture is that of something that rushes, like the cloud when condensation reaches its point and falls as rain, in a process of constant transformation of matter. The way to occupy space with an ethereal body is to understand its movement, in this case the cloud as something that is in constant transformation, a process and not an object.

Natalia Domínguez’s practice is mainly sculptural, from sculpture she works on issues related to language and meanings, the generation of symbols, codes and communicative abstractions. She understands language as something that flows, the limits of which are flexible and liquid. According to the artist “if language is a social pact, it is malleable, changeable and, consequently, chameleonic”*.

* Extract from Aigua sobre pols (Water on dust), text by Caterina Almirall and Margot Cuevas for SWAB Ephemeral 2022

©Images: Pol Masip and Roberto Ruíz