Until June 11th, Fricciones, the new exhibition by Luciana Lamothe at Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery, can be visited. It is composed of sculptures, video, and a recent installation.
The word friction comes from the Latin frictio and refers to the action and effect of two bodies rubbing against each other. At the exact moment of contact, the two bodies transform each other, and it is this instant of mutation that Luciana Lamothe seeks to investigate by provoking friction between the body of the materials, the body of the performers, the spectators, and the artist herself.
The Heartbeats of Matter
For over a decade, Luciana Lamothe has insisted on connecting with the sensitive life of materials. By conceiving them as living bodies, she carefully attends to their pulses and latencies. She perceives the subtle activity of the muscles and nerves of supposedly inert materials to endow them with life.
But this plasticity is revealed precisely at the moment of direct contact with another body.
Lamothe highlights the plasticity of wood, a material long present in her repertoire, using simple and effective procedures that intervene in its behavior, such as changing scale or layering. Since the vitality of matter is relational, the sculptures in Fricciones are brought to life at the exact, fleeting moment they are touched by another body—the human body. When contact ends, when the ephemeral breath of life ceases, the wooden body returns to its original state: like a spring, which stores energy and releases it to return to its initial shape, the turbulence subsides.
The transformative experience generated by Lamothe’s work is not the substantial alteration of matter but the intensification of its elasticity, marking the point of contact between bodies as a seismic epicenter. This transformation does not repeat identically but differently each time, depending on the force, pressure, size, or location of the body that makes contact.
In each of the exhibited works, different possibilities of transformation upon contact are presented. The boards of the structures accompanying the performance Invoking the Act are flexed by the force and pressure of the performers, bending the cubes and opening the wedges. The large funnel at the entrance to Room 2 opens only by the push of the person entering it, without the possibility of retreat.
In her interest in testing the limits of contact between the human body and materials, Lamothe created models with wooden boards where figures attempt impossible postures that accentuate the vertigo that accompanies, to a greater or lesser extent, any intense experience. Finally, in a humorous gesture, the artist challenges her own quest to give flexibility to rigid materials, instead seeking rigidity in what has already been flexed, as occurs in the video.
The word friction refers to the action and effect of two bodies rubbing together. At the exact moment of contact, the two bodies transform each other, and it is this instant of mutation that Lamothe seeks to explore by provoking friction between the body of the materials, the performers, the spectators, and the artist herself. In that moment, the minimal gesture is concentrated, one that distances itself from any preconceived concept, the stripping that intensifies, the distillation that reveals and makes emerge what remained hidden: the heartbeats of matter, the modes of existence of each body.
— Ana Inciarte
