The challenge of following the trail of forms

The choice of materials 

In any choice, the options imply a game among all that is possible to choose and use. As part of the game, it is also known, there is the impossibility of everything being feasible, since the instructions are in charge of delimiting the margins of the game board. It is in this liminal space and in the process of constant remarking where the choice of material is decisive, because a texture, a technique, the color of a material or its hardness or elasticity are the alphabet of the sculpture. The final story first needs letters to form the words that, when put together, will connect the story with our senses; the physical with the emotional; the learned with the willing.

Claudia Pastomás does this without making it obvious and without appearing to have a cost after doing so, that is, without losing the freedom imposed by the instructions. Because in her case, they rather mark a context of use, a space of action. The materials do not seem to be chosen by her as much as it is she who seems to have been chosen by the materials. This is the case, for example, of the iron chips that are embedded in the wooden beams where there are cracks in order to repair them, like staples that leave a wound attached. The title of the exhibition redefines the act of physical repair and expands the meaning to the realm of the intangible, of emotions and memory. In every intuition of what the final sculpture will be, there is another intuition: what will be the best way to match a form with a concept, an idea with a presence? Is this choice a method or a lexicon? Will it be what allows an interpretation or what activates a process of recovery?

The importance of form

Every work needs a form, even when it is its own negation or absence. To deny the form would then be a sort of aphorism that would explain an attitude of the sculptor similar to how an iconoclast would handle images, destroying them. But there is no such risk here. The challenge is imposed as a succession of things that occur simultaneously or correlatively; as a series that requires time and space as catalysts of its own story. A surface folding in on itself, a perforated sheet, torn paper or rectangular supports from which layers of surface have been removed -drawing on them certain enlarged landscapes- are forms that reinforce his ideas: those of continuing to be forms of materials that are, likewise, concepts. And that persist in their efforts, because their movements, now forced by the fixation of some pieces with others, have stopped their flexibility or have suppressed their return to the origin; they have been petrified, which is a way of saying that their forms have been solidified, reified.

C. Pastomás generates formally diverse sculptures that maintain, nevertheless, an intrinsic similarity; a relationship between stories told that, although they may come from many different places and even belong to divergent or antagonistic cultures, have been told with the same voice, with an exact intonation. The two larger sculptures, arranged vertically on the broad side, have been stapled together with pieces that evoke those aforementioned tokens that now hang on a wall, exposed as vestiges of a dying action, of practices that have been abandoned.

The logic of discontinuity

Nevertheless, and in spite of this, what the sculptor brings is a discontinuity in certain parameters (materials, formats, techniques, finishes) that generates dissociations. The remains of marks, holes, pressures on the wood surfaces, misalignments in the undulations of curved MDF boards… complete a way of expressing herself that, following the linguistic simile, could be understood as aphasia, being as it is an expression full of security, which vocalizes even mas-ti-can-do the syllables. However, they suggest a certain tension between what is thought, what is finally said -like a speech in which words and phrases are improvised within a foreseen plan, pre-designed beforehand- and the external reaction to what is already said, once said, in the audience.

Voices without bodies, because the bodies have become echoes of forms, traces of sounds heard at some time and place; not here, but existing, that persist in the memory of those who lived them, or in the memory so many times repeated and reinvented by those who told them.

The resolution of the works

With these assumptions, how is the final reading of the works resolved? What do they respond to and why do they engage in these apparently dilettante conversations that do not lead to fine discursive lines? First, because the discursive lines are the folds of the materials and the marks on their surfaces; the uncoupling and the happy encounters between opposites. Secondly, because what one expects to hear from these works has nothing to do with what one expects to see from the use of their materials. The resolution, therefore, is suspended or in suspense until what is looked at and what is heard coincide: an action that will only be completed by those who stop their time in front of this space. 

The folds of the world can be seen concentrated in a pair of curved pieces, arranged in the room like the trace of a gesture repeated several times, which converse with the two openings of the space and its semicircular arches located in the background. Shapes that aspire to fill in the gaps; words that would like to faithfully explain the impossibility of achieving it.

Álvaro de los Ángeles 

Art curator and critic