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Ana Laura Aláez at CA2M Centro de Arte dos de Mayo

January 23, 2020

Artist: Ana Laura Aláez

Exhibition title: Todos los conciertos, todas las noches, todo vacío (All Concerts, Every Night, All Empty)

Curated by: Bea Espejo

Venue: CA2M Centro de Arte dos de Mayo, Madrid, Spain

Date: November 8, 2019 – January 26, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist, CA2M Centro de Arte dos de Mayo and the respective copyright holders

The exhibition on view at CA2M showcases works by Ana Laura Aláez spanning from the 1990s until the present. Some have never been seen before while others are based on ideas that remained latent in the interstices of her better-known works which now, many years later, are brought back to their starting point. There are also some newly conceived pieces, reinterpretations of iconic works and new dialogues created based on prior works. These leaps across time and places held in suspension underpin an idea of trajectory that has little to do with chronology. This exhibition which is, above all else, an exercise in context is basically grounded in the idea that the consequences of art operate over a long-term scale, like an ongoing dialogue between various voices on certain battles still being waged.

Therein the echoes in the title, Todos los conciertos, todas las noches, todo vacío [All Concerts, Every Night, All Empty], borrowed from one of the artist’s works from 2009, which occupies centre stage in the exhibition here at CA2M. The very nature of this work suggests many different layers of interpretation and a degree of complexity that adopts well to the artist’s creative enterprise. It functions almost like a deafening silence. It appeared after a turning point for Aláez, when she revitalized her gaze, returning to the origin of her practice and to the idea of using experience as an instrument that always has something to add. Therein the reiteration of “all”, that “everything” which acts as a metaphor for the exhibition as a whole: transforming the formless mass of what lies latent within a personal search into something that can be conveyed by the conduit of language.

Ana Laura Aláez works within the fissures of her own practice, those spaces which are impossible to delimit but which are always more or less visible. For this reason, the exhibition is conceived as a series of internal negotiations between pools with often unpredictable and whimsical perimeters. The floor at CA2M where the exhibition takes place is divided into four sections, each one presided over by a central piece which is counterpointed by various groups of works, evincing two or three overlaps or intersections between each other and producing a multitude of voices that spark an internal dialogue within the exhibition.

The first group we come across is Objects and Abject Extensions, consisting of a number of sculptures and images that address the recreation of objects and the artificial extensions of the body. Here we have Trayectoria (Like Gold and Faceted 1, 2, y 3), 2014, an installation comprising four pieces in which perfectly polished aluminium sheets are draped over a bar suspended from an industrial pulley, in which the balance of the lines seems to safeguard us from the vulnerable position in which we are placed. The dialogue established with people wearing sculptures, Donna (1 and 2) and Superhéroe romano (1 and 2), two works from 1996, trigger the performative aspect that was always latent in her practice. In these works, the person is the pedestal for the sculpture or vice versa, and their movements are either a commandeering or a denial of space, something the artist endorsed in her rela-tional installations in which the monument is an inhabitable scale model. At once, works like Corona (1994—2019), Culito (1996—2008) and Pantalón preservativo (1992—2019) open a dialogue with problematics affecting AIDS in the nineties, which, in the case of Cortina (1994—2015), Ana Laura Aláez repeated in 2018, entitled El conflicto es otro, underscoring another of her axioms: the inconclusiveness of structures.

The second group of works, Excitement and Emptiness, responds to the dark underbelly of enthusiasm. It evokes a literal reading, a personal excitement, but also another much more buried reading that has to do with women artists and the danger of becoming victims of the enthusiasm of an era. While a work like Shaving (1997) concentrated all the excitement that precedes an event, Todos los conciertos, todas las noches, todo vacío (2009), the work that gives its name to the show, is more reminiscent of the aftermath of an event: T-shirts as traces of the space we inhabit, leaving the print of our presence but also our absence. In this context, the documentary Dance & Disco (vídeo documental del uso de la instalación) (2000—2019), using recordings Ana Laura Aláez made at Museo Reina Sofía, resituates her practice within relational aesthetics and adds a further layer to the idea of expectation generated by any moment of hope: what could have been and what finally was.

The emptiness of all wounds marks the third section Violence and Vulnerability. Here the works respond to a play of distances between the trio of colour, emotion and support in the woodcuts Lazos de sangre (2014), the sculptures Cabeza-Espiral-Agujero-Puño-Esperma-Nudo (2008) and the video Butterflies (2004). The love song featured in the last-named work, written by Ana Laura Aláez herself and which she performs although you cannot hear her, provides the soundtrack to the exhibition and introduces another of the sculptural qualities of her practice: placing two opposites on the same plane.

The fourth group of works, Myth, Women’s Sexuality, Ideology of Camouflage, continues to explore some of the age-old dilemmas of sculpture: the void as material, the skin as invisible clothing or the eternal quandary between the head and the bust. Three sexually evocative sculptures (Lengua, 1995—2009; Perritos, 1994; and Origen, 2018) give way to the corporal and tectonic. Sade era una mujer (1993—2013) is an updated version of Fucked Man, one of the works she made during Ángel Bados’ workshop at Arteleku in 1991, a time when she cast off all the academic prejudices picked up at the School of Fine Arts in Bilbao, where she had studied. With Bolso (1993), she also slammed the door on male authority, reducing the archetype of the father figure to a portable old pair of underpants. The two photos by Ana Laura Aláez in Fotomatón N.Y. (1 and 2) (1992), now shown as a single work, reaffirm an always inconclusive state open to experience.

In the atrium at CA2M, sculpture is pitted against architecture in a radical play of volumes in which the sculptural object takes on a physicity, a categoricalness and an independence of its own, even though at times it is ‘almost’ invisible. The army of Tigras y felinas (1995), itself a manifesto of ideologies and genders, strikes up a dialogue with the series Indefinido 1, 2 y 3 (2018—2019) and Boceto de Mujeres sobre zapatos de plataforma (2019), updating one of her most iconic works and subverting the idea of the sketch by elevating it to an artwork in its own right. She then takes another shift in Dancefloor (2019), turning the emblematic dancefloor of Dance & Disco (2000) into a vertical sculpture and, in doing so, the floor into a wall. The glitz has vanished, but not the feminine presence latent in nightlife nor her idea of femininity that always advocates a plural identity between brackets.

-Bea Espejo, curator

Ana Laura Aláez, Todos los conciertos, todas las noches, todo vacío (All Concerts, Every Night, All Empty), November 8, 2019 – January 26, 2020, exhibition view, CA2M Centro de Arte dos de Mayo, Madrid, photo: Sue Ponce