El palacio a las 4 de la mañana
El palacio a las 4 de la mañana
Curated by Alberto Ríos de la Rosa
Andrés Anza
Pablo Arellano
Liz Capote
Paula Cortazar
Diego de Romay
Diego Inestrillas
Raúl Mirlo
Cristobal Ochoa
Natalia Ramos
Miriam Salado
The exhibition takes as its point of departure The Palace at 4 a.m. (1932) by Alberto Giacometti, a sculpture the artist linked to a six-month period spent in the company of a woman with whom, night after night, he built a fantastical, fragile palace out of matchsticks. Within that confession reside several foundational ideas like spatial construction as a metaphor for emotional states, the inherent fragility of every significant creation, and the repetitive act of making as a simultaneous form of knowledge and desire. Giacometti’s piece crystallized surrealism’s distinctive capacity to transform intimate experience into oneiric architecture, and it is from that premise that the ten artists gathered here propose works that transmute material, political, and existential urgencies into visual constructions inhabited by ghosts, memory, and longing.
The temporal marker Giacometti chose for his title functions here as the first curatorial axis. Four o’clock in the morning designates a precise instant in which ordinary reality is suspended, and the constructions of the unconscious emerge. The works gathered under this principle inhabit an expanded temporality in which past, present, and future coexist simultaneously, much as they do in the architecture of dream and memory. From the wax that registers the temperature of whatever has passed through it in Pablo Arellano’s practice to the anthropomorphic forms suspended in a gravity less space by Cristóbal Ochoa, each piece proposes an operation in which linear time yields to a dilated perception of the instant. Natalia Ramos explores the suspended time of dawn within the refuge, that intermediate state where inhabiting is always provisional; while Liz Capote situates her figures in unreal landscapes where dance and combat share the same choreography and existential conflict unfolds across the terrain of consciousness.
The second curatorial axis addresses constructive fragility as one of the fundamental ruptures of sculptural modernism. In conceiving the Palace, Giacometti defied the tradition of sculpture as solid mass and proposed instead a psychic structure that is transparent and inhabited. The works convened here explore that material vulnerability from diverse positions. Andrés Anza suspends ceramic bodies within a system of spatial relations where the absence of a base transforms the assemblage into a formal problem. Paula Cortázar articulates marble modules whose verticality depends on the equilibrium between their parts, translating in the selection of each stone the affective stages of a shared domestic life. Diego Inestrillas delineates an interval that appears on the verge of collapse, where the thinnest elements sustain the existence of the entire volume and a hybrid organism (between the biological and the synthetic) calls into question the separation of living and inert matter. Raúl Mirlo constructs a wall of one hundred and thirty lattice screens in which modular accumulation evokes Giacometti’s will to rebuild the Palace as many times as necessary. Diego de Romay negotiates with the prior intelligence of the wood block; subordinating formal will to the organic conditions of the material. Miriam Salado transforms the found object into a sculptural device without stripping it of its condition as an organic remnant, articulating the convergence between natural defenses and weapons produced by human hands.
The exhibition operates as an amplifier of the resonances between Giacometti and contemporary practice. Its intention is to foster a reading that reinterprets and expands the legacy of that foundational construction, understood as an operative structure prepared to collapse and be rebuilt each time someone crosses its threshold.