Archaeology of the Now

‘Rascando la superficie’ focuses on the material traces that we find in the Earth’s crust with the work of unusual artists in our circuit

For some time now, man’s footprint on the earth has become the central axis of programs, biennials, texts and works. We see it clearly these days in the 2120 exhibition at the Patio Herreriano in Valladolid and it resonates as a basso continuo in Rascando lasurface, in the Travesía Cuatro gallery. The latter focuses on the material traces – not only organic, but also artificial – that we find in the Earth’s crust and does so by turning the participating artists into archaeologists of our present. Thus, these contemporary gleaners are witnesses of a nature that coexists at a forced pace with plastics, of cities in which plants wither, objects lose meaning when their use expires and in which robotics begins to appear. The crux of the matter is not so much the climate emergency but the different layers of life that we can trace here and now.

We talk about the same place (the Earth) and the same time (the 21st century) when we walk among the canvases covered with brush strokes by Vivian Suter (Buenos Aires, 1949). The artist has been taking refuge for years in a Guatemalan village where she works outdoors. He hangs his canvases in the middle of the jungle – similar to how they look now in the gallery – letting the inclement weather and even animals act directly on them. With her practice, she erases the limits between human and nature in the same way that the young Lucía Bayón (Madrid, 1994) turns to natural materials that she brings together in impossible combinations of paper pulp, flour, pumice stone or starch. He molds containers with the resulting mortar that are stacked or distributed on the floor and whose heavy appearance has little to do with their light reality. Exactly the opposite of the type of obsidian baptismal font by Tania Pérez Córdova (Mexico City, 1979), located in front, although both influence the lived objects in their discourse.