“Our project has been developing in a natural and intuitive way,” says Sol Abaurrea, co-founder of Galería Belmonte (Belmonte de Tajo, 61) together with Ana Coronel, when asked about the exhibition that her space is currently hosting. “We continue to maintain the purpose with which we started: to create a new network of visitors and collectors, not necessarily young, and to make known the work of the artists with whom we collaborate and represent both in Spain and abroad through fairs,” she adds. Under the umbrella of thought they marked their first collective exhibition,Claro del Bosque, which included some of the artists with whom, three years later, they continue to collaborate. One of them, Julia Creuheras, returns now, and until Saturday, May 18, to what was her –creative– home withlightbodies.
Preceded by a medium-sized courtyard, the nave that gives shape and body to Galería Belmonte – and which was once a cow trough – is a canvas of pure white, broken only by the works with which Creuheras surprises us. “In the exhibition I revolve around quantum doubt, a concept that explains that reality materializes at the moment it meets the observer. Matter, before that encounter, is not defined. And it is only when we perceive it that it takes shape. I understand that it is something difficult to digest, since it breaks with the classical physical mentality, but I find it fascinating. Quantum physics proposes understanding that doubt as a truth, legitimizing indeterminacy,” she explains.
Her pieces, which mix gears, textiles and lights, and which are halfway between pop culture, the ethereal and poetry, blur the boundaries of what is alive and what is not. “The word animate means to contain that breath that we call life or to have a soul, anima in latin, but it also means to have movement. And I ask myself: ‘Could it be that all things that move are alive?’” the artist muses. “For me, machines are dead and alive at the same time, like Schrödinger’s cat. And that’s what I like, blurring dichotomous lines,” she adds.
The materials that Julia Creuheras uses in lightbodies are mostly translucent latex and silver thread. “I started using this thread to allegorize the fabric of which reality is made. According to quantum physics, reality is made up of vibrating filaments. That’s how I started making clothes, which was the way I felt comfortable drawing the body,” she says. The best thing about latex, she says, is its translucent capacity: “It lets you guess what is behind it, but you can’t really see it completely. In my opinion, it is a material that contains uncertainty.” With them, the creative has created gloves that breathe, shoes that shine or shirts that pulsate. Sometimes these movements are so subtle that one wonders whether they really occur or not – this is Creuheras’ doubt.
After learning about her work, one cannot help but wonder whether, in a world where quick and easy answers abound, we are prepared to be seduced by uncertainty. Creuheras is clear about it: “I think it is necessary to find a moment to make peace with emptiness. I propose to bring the exercise that quantum mechanics has done to accept doubt into our daily lives. That does not mean living uninformed, but rather consuming information without needing to determine whether it is true or false. If we let go of that insatiable search, the power of truth is diluted, losing the throne that we gave it.”
Architectural Digest
