The Galería Elba Benítez is pleased to present the new work by Lucía C. Pino.
Titled U Said ‘Stay’, So I Stayed, the exhibition consist of photographs and sculptures in various materials that, both individually and taken together, display C. Pino’s characteristic method of assembling divergent elements so as to create a sense of flux which in turn parallels essentially fluid aspects of human experiences of gender, desire and pleasure. U Said ‘Stay’, So I Stayed is the second installment of a trilogy of exhibitions by C. Pino that began with But if you love us at the Centro Botín (Santander) in 2023 and will culminate in a solo show at CA2M Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Móstoles, Madrid) in 2025.
U Said ‘Stay’, So I Stayed is the C. Pino’s first solo exhibition at the Galería Elba Benítez, which now represents the artist.
The practice of Lucía C. Pino (lives and works in Barcelona) spans various formats, including sculpture, photography, drawing, performance or installation. Regardless of format, C. Pino’s work creates contrapuntal associations among materials, textures, structures, scales and formats, highlighting their haptic and sensual qualities. Taken as a whole, C. Pino’s practice aligns itself with the fluidity of a queer ethos, while also emphasizing the inherently performative aspect of the creative act.
C. Pino has shown their work in different institutions such as the Centro Botín (Santander, 2023); MACBA Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2023); CA2M Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Móstoles, Madrid, 2023); Patio Herreriano Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Español (Valladolid, 2023); artiatx (Bilbao, 2022); Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2022); La Capella MACBA (Barcelona, 2021); La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2022, 2021); Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona, 2021); Centre d’Art Tecla Sala (L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, 2021); La Panera (Lleida, 2021); Arts Santa Mònica (Barcelona, 2017); Espai 13 of Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona, 2018) among others. The artist was invited to participate at the Biennal d’Art Leandre Cristòfol (La Panera, Lleida, 2021).
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U SAID “STAY”, SO I STAYED
Notes:
It is an exhibition that shows the result of long-term research on sculpture, the poetics and politics of materials, their circular economy and their relationship with the image.
The title, U SAID “STAY”, SO I STAYED, comes from a text by Jalal Toufic in which the author explores themes such as time, presence, absence and waiting.
Jalal Toufic is a Lebanese artist and writer. Born to an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother, they help me understand how cultural and historical memory can be altered or erased by catastrophic events, such as wars or exile.
With the distance that separates our experiences, this text and this particular sentence help me to reflect on the idea of archive, a material and image archive that is built or destroyed in real time.
I present 4 sculptures: two centre pieces and two wall pieces, together with a series of photographs (5).
I am interested in the poetics that are activated by combining materials that show signs of their previous life, that carry a lot of information or that require a special dedication, with materials that belong more to the sculptural canon.
Each of them requires a special technique making each piece unique.
There is something of nostalgia, something of imprint and graft.
Much of the material is recovered. For me, this activates a complex nostalgia that doesn’t want to repeat itself forever, because the will interferes and produces syntactic turns. This nostalgia is difficult to grasp in geopolitical terms.
In the sculptures, metal is the common element and textile and plant fibre are important materials.
There are repeated gestures such as the deconstruction and recomposition in the textile patterns, or in the work with stainless steel and iron. Folding, cutting, and joining, help me in terms of rhythm, style, proportion and distribution.
There is a very direct relationship of the pieces with the human scale and with what my body can do at that moment and this is subject to several variables, being the production conditions an important one.
The proposed materials, the finish of the pieces and letting the hand that draws them to be seen also allow me to reflect on issues of class. Transferring some of the language of the street to the text or the exhibition space is important to me.
There are five images, two of which come out of the residency I did at Triangle Astérides earlier in 2024 in Marseille, and the other three are from my personal archive.
The queer, trans and POC community is present, as are the other elements of nature and the materials themselves.
Everything happens in relation, in a relationship of equivalence. The elements are at the same time a source of inspiration, knowledge and desire.
The exhibition is part of a trilogy about love, amor amorfo (amorphous love in Spanish), if you like, because anyone who tries to talk about love gets trapped in a density that is difficult to define. And there we are, trying to understand and relate to it.
There are no conclusions or solutions in the exhibition. Rather, there are directions, material and atmosphere, and I would like it to be understood from there.
