“Oh Dear, Oh Dear! How queer everything is today!”
One morning, Alice exclaims in astonishment and wonders whether she might have been changed during the night… That sense of wonder—that which amazes and unsettles in equal measure, in the face of the discontinuity of our sen- sations and the doubt that we remain always identical to ourselves—runs through the entire body of work by Delia Cancela. A master of paradox, she makes logic stumble and sanity tremble, with figuration as delicate as it is threatening, walking the fine line between the human, the vegetal, and the animal worlds.
With that boldness, she draws us into the tempestuous realms (literary, historical, visual, alchemical…) that she in- habits and that inhabit her, composing from bits and piec- es, cutouts, scraps of tarlatan, small objects—and also from words and books. She collects, gathers, and composes, laugh- ing at linear or chronological coherence: a drawing made many years ago that had never been shown finds its little paper bird today. Displacing the coordinates of the world and our perception, she takes us on a journey through inno- cent little flowers that sometimes get very hot, finely drawn bird-women, fingers that sketch out a quiet fuck you, and cloths/aprons with hand-written phrases that, rather than becoming slogans, invite us to walk the edge of (non)sense…
Far from being a “project”—artistic or otherwise—her work is more, in the words of Étienne Souriau, a trajectory: a path that listens closely to what emerges from the stub- born, slightly punk gesture that disrupts the expected use of
things, again and again. Through the meanders of this path, color makes any surface vibrate, like a silent music across her drawings, collages, paintings, sculptures, and subtly defiant chromatic walls.
A singular tone—ranging from red to burgundy—threads through much of her work, in infinite variations: her painted lips, her long fine hair, even the pencil holder in her studio. If I follow that thread—like someone going out on a limb—I’d say that more than artworks, what has entered the gallery today is an entire artistic practice, and perhaps, a life.
I start to drift (literally: I leave the straight track), and I see Delia sitting there, to the side, in a green armchair, suddenly exclaiming:“It’s not just a show… I dove into the pool… and I don’t know how to swim!”
In this present moment, when everything seems destined to be tamed by a management of emotions that aims to replace any daring pedagogical experience, and by a regulation of behavior reduced to a binary algorithm of “like/don’t like” that threatens to substitute every aesthetic encounter, Delia Cancela throws us into the pool without knowing how to swim. And she does so by betting—fiercely and subtly—on just how “queer everything is today,” with a slow, irrever- ent practice, the need to take time and, above all—but truly above all—a good long moment of silence.
