1.(The Social Life of Visible Things)

In most stories, or epic poems, action is what accumulates at the tip of an arrow as it crosses space. If we cover the arrow’s tip with a sheet, we see that it barely captures the details of the scenes it traverses. Instead, the visual is woven into that covered tip with the speed and precision required by the narrative. Upon removing the sheet from the arrow, this is what we find: at the center, a sequence of images can be seen drawn, but most of it consists of voids untouched by action—abrupt patches of unpainted fabric where the density of events didn’t roll through. Unfolding the sheet disrupts the narrative woven by the arrow—or rather, it unveils it. The blank spaces are evidence of possible subplots or even the direct impact of objects. Without abandoning the impressions left by the arrow, Claudia Rebeca Lorenzo completes the unpainted parts of the sheet. She returns to the scenes the arrow passed through, not so much to offer another narrative adapted to its speed and trajectory, but to attend to that part of the social life of visible things that resists being narrated.

2.(Energizing a Landscape)

Our passage through the world is a collision with things as we make decisions despite them. We decide while propelling ourselves toward objects, driven by a system of intensities already in motion, carried by its currents, resisting them, and modifying them at certain points. Claudia Rebeca Lorenzo immerses herself in the landscape, but what she stirs there is not placed at the service of a story or any other format that lets the social life of physical things seep through like a sieve. What Lorenzo does is energize the landscape, amplifying the systems of relationships that occur within it without abstracting or entirely detaching them from the material arrangements and objects from which they emanate. To energize a landscape, one must have traversed it and collided with it many times. This is precisely why Lorenzo visually captures the pressure exerted by past experiences when revisiting the same place. Pasolini: “You are dead, and so are we / with you, in this damp garden.”

3.(Flight in Dialect)

Renee Gladman walks with her girlfriend through San Francisco, rehearsing a language. The honking of cars, the gestures, movements, and interactions of the two as they walk through the city begin to articulate new words and phrases. This language, like jargon, carries fragments of a specific landscape within it. If someone is unfamiliar with that landscape, the jargon becomes inscrutable. In her works, Claudia Rebeca Lorenzo does not attempt to decode this jargon for consumption but makes room for the inscrutable without abandoning precision. Pasolini, refusing to translate in rural Friuli, where he grew up, or in the slums of Rome, where the obscene local language required translation for many Italians. Pasolini: “Immaculate in my sex… the boy who flies in dialect / over his virgin, worldless heart.”

Leto Ybarra

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In Claudia Rebeca’s work, she seeks to carry out a sensitive and material approach to certain anthropomorphic qualities that have been central to her practice in recent years. Anthropomorphism here is understood as a recognition of the formal aspects of sculpture, but through low-intensity figuration, which eludes direct representation and generates, through a process of abstraction, a relationship of continuity with the landscape.

Although her work includes a consideration of reality, the observation of everyday surroundings and the landscape, and even biographical aspects, the construction of the image or object arises from a material operation. Claudia Rebeca focuses her approach on a process of dialogue with the complexity of encounters and the symbolic materials generated throughout the development of her work. She acknowledges that her work carries elements of the totem, the mask, and makeup.

Claudia Rebeca Lorenzo is an artist based in Bilbao. She has participated in the experimental art school Kalostra (San Sebastián) and in the independent Studies Programme of MACBA (Barcelona) directed by Paul B. Preciado. She was resident at Solomon R. Gugghenheim (New York, 2022), Half House (Barcelona, 2022), Villavergerie (Huesca, 2020) and in Tabakalera (San Sebastián, 2019).

Her most recent exhibitions include Blanco Cristal, Half House, (Barcelona); Viento Cristal, Raccoon (Barcelona); Spek, ASALTO con Caniche Editorial, (Ibarrangelu); El sentido de la escultura, Fundación Joan Miró (Barcelona); Alrededor de una cabeza, Bilbaoarte Fundación (Bilbao); Pala de plata, Sala Amadís, (Madrid); Generaciones 2020, La Casa Encendida, (Madrid); BI, DOS, TWO, Azkuna Zentroa, (Bilbao); Cabeza frente Cabeza, Salón, (Madrid).