Desbordar al centro de la noche

Starting from an obsession with collecting materials and their subsequent classification process, Julia Llerena has spent a decade building an archive of the everyday. In her studio-workshop, broken materials, orphaned pieces, waste, and discards from others are transformed into languages, given structures, or turned into new objects of the present. 'From the accumulation [of the past], memory is built and recollection is born,' says the artist. Likewise, the two bodies of work that inhabit the gallery space, ‘Reverberation of the verb’ and ‘Overflowing at the Center of the Night’, are echoes of the past, or pasts, that the artist re-materializes with a different form and texture.

In Julia Llerena's practice, remnants from the past are tools at the service of words, serving transcription and the creation of poetic images. This exhibition borrows its title from a verse from the poem by the Uruguayan writer Ida Vitale, ‘Traducir’¹. “Poetry carries the power of the word, a combination of words translates into a powerful image, provokes an emotion”, according to Llerena. With this conviction, the verses of Vitale, Maurice Blanchot, and Chantal Maillard populate the works exhibited in the space. Here, Julia Llerena strips words of their rationality and endows them with a physical dimension, with relief and folds, roughness, and shine.

Dualities are a constant in Julia Llerena's practice, and as the visitor delves into the exhibition, they can discern between the perceived and the real. The black fabrics are not entirely black, the lightweight gauzes resemble the density of marble, and textiles are adorned with an array of chains, mirrors, jewelry crystals, or pieces of old chandeliers. The surface exists both in front and behind the work, fulfilling the dual function of canvas and wall. Here time folds back on itself, no longer linear: the past and the present occupy the same physical plane, that of the dual surface of the works.

According to Roland Barthes, text means fabric. A fabric behind which lies, more or less hidden, the meaning (the truth), and where we emphasize the generative idea that the text is produced, worked through a perpetual intertwining, in which the subject is lost and dissolves immersed in it2. The exhibition 'Overflowing at the Center of the Night' is the translation of a series of personal notes and experiences of the artist, a place where dreams, doubt, and fears are born. As is customary in Julia Llerena's practice, the message is free, not read, remembrance should be intuited and felt.

¹ 'Translate' by Ida Vitale, 'The Writing of the Disaster' by Maurice Blanchot, 'The Infinite Does Not Exist' (To Kill Plato), and 'The Wound in the Tongue' by Chantal Maillard.