Get acquainted with them

not by representation

but because of affective contamination

Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis

On the stage and in the laboratory, Sabrina Merayo Nuñez borrows from them the particular ways they display their objects. We see the minimum number of pieces necessary to establish a hypothesis of the human gesture that passes through matter. Pieces that are so strong in themselves that they can stand alone, with the traces of the work done on them as the only argument. Isolated and reunited, distributed in the space surrounded by silence so that this is the best outbreak of meaning. From the stage, the presentation of forces is replicated - as happens in the meeting of the protagonist and the agonist on the stage or the projection of the actor's voice towards his audience - with the difference that here the bodies are the materials in a concrete state (before that figurative) and what we see are brief scenes stopped in time: resistances of the material, mutations to which they were subjected, suspended processes halfway to becoming something else; ultimately trials and displacements. From the laboratory, we not only recognize the way to approach the object and analyze it in its parts, we can, above all, recognize that each piece is a sample obtained in the workshop between tools and books, between objects to be disassembled and works to be finished.

In Conformaciones, by using her own collection of materials from the universe of furniture, Merayo Nuñez creates a type of inventory that associates the artistic gesture with a perspective of philosophical meaning, in the particular context of the white box of a gallery, focusing on the operations that were used to modify matter before the industrialization of the object was the norm. Here the artist acts as a collector and alchemist: she removes the objects from their system of origin and inserts them into that apparently neutral space - that museological aesthetic that adds aesthetic value and an appropriate distance from the world of the utilitarian. In this territory of the poetic, the viewer is invited to read each shape with tactile eyes, to go through the meeting of materials that occurs in the pieces and pay attention to the tensions, what gives way and what vibrates in those abstract links. These conformations can be read as haikus, because of their brevity, because they evoke an instant and because their reading is above all a passage to the abstraction of the senses.

The artist displays a set of works that account for the relationship between human beings, ideas and objects present in the dramas of our history, read through furniture and ornament. There is a universal force in Merayo Nuñez's practice, applicable to the metaphor of the machine –the exposition of the parts, their relationships and the notion of their limits, rather than the whole as something opaque for the user– by making visible what is it is usually invisible. What is the proper syntax of an object? How many ways to combine and arrange are there for a set of materials? What happens when those same materials, forced by the power of work on matter, are directed towards new states? These are some of the questions that could have guided the work carried out in Conformations, that is, the practical research on how objects and materials are given different roles and meanings in time and cultures until reaching our present; the artist dismantles and reorganizes them in order to find other powers in those relationships. Small powers, brief moments of encounters, that divert the natural course of our relationship with these objects and propose a different way of being in the world or, at least, more awake, more attentive.

Mariana Rodriguez Iglesias