The title of this presentation, “entredós,” is taken from a verse in a poem by the artist Pepe Espaliú. In one of his final works, “El nido,” created in 1993, the artist walked in continuous circles on a platform mounted high in a tree for eight days, removing one garment each day until, on the last day, he was completely naked. Moving between one extreme (fully clothed) and the other (completely nude) in his wooden confinement, the artist may have found a sudden fluidity of being: both hidden and exposed, neither covered nor naked. Trapped in a transitional space, with two sides touching each other, his body formed a continuum.

Like Espaliú, Lucía Bayón is interested in movements of circularity and intermediate spaces, specifically when it comes to the (de)construction of garments. The French word “entredeux,” from which “entredós” is translated, refers to the intermediate state between extremes, a piece of furniture placed between two openings, and more commonly, to a scalloped embroidery that joins two pieces of fabric. The decorative holes of the embroidery open up as they are joined. It is on these axes that Bayón presents her new body of work: a constellation of textile imaginaries, bas-reliefs, and sculptures shaped by gestures that interrogate material hierarchies and production conditions.

Spread throughout these rooms are dark blue armatures reinforced with denim pulp and slender rectangles reminiscent of watering troughs, patched with plastered cardboard. Garments have been unwound at their seams, their inverted parts arranged to form a new whole. Undulating folds, steps, and soles are drawn on wrinkles as they protrude from the walls. Each of these pieces is based on processes that have become a constant in Bayón’s practice: hours and hours are devoted to pulp made from paper and fabric, whose crushed fibers take on a renewed role as the artist’s raw material.

Combining industrial and manual processing methods, Bayón sustains a circuit, one that entangles the residual in a slow becoming. In her formulation of the works, the artist has taken the notion of pattern as a guiding principle. The construction of garment patterns resembles the construction of a mold. Here, a set of flat and abstract pieces—a pocket, a shirt sleeve—come together and gain volume. Fullness develops from the surfaces.

That “entredós” designates a liminal space where processes permeate each other, and binary regimes of meaning-making are discarded. In return, we encounter multiple tension, with an opaque accumulation of layers, where the weave has matured into a thick materiality. Seamstresses used to hide private inscriptions in the lining of coats and jackets; on the reverse side of the fabric, on the side that faces the inside of the garment. Never seen by the wearer or observer, they are not exactly in front of us, but not very far away.

Dagmar Bosma

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