The architecture of a space unfolds an invisible choreography that directs and distributes the transit of bodies. It is the interweaving and intersection of flows and connections between bodies and materials that drive Mercedes Pimiento to investigate the infrastructures and spatial conditions that shape our perception of the environment in order to go beyond and challenge its limits. 

Less than Container Load delves into the language of matter and architecture, exploring how both can generate or alter a given reality. The title of the exhibition refers to a term used in maritime transport to designate those loads that have small volumes and dimensions and that alone do not occupy an entire container, so they can be accumulated with others to optimise space. In dialogue with the architecture of the white cube, whose exterior shape evokes an industrial form of transportation, the materials contract and expand with the desire to denaturalise and transform their circulation and permeability. In the modular process, in which the industrial or logistical scale is juxtaposed with the human scale, the flows of matter invite us to speculate on what might have been part of the space and to fantasise about what it might house. In this context, the works intrinsically dialogue with the geographical environment of l'Hospitalet de Llobregat; an industrial city converted into the logistical and functional junkyard of Barcelona. 

Through the use of alloys of beeswax, vegetable wax and paraffin, the artist explores the relationship between organic and synthetic materials; their porosity and capacity to gain or lose shape. The mutable and transitory nature of these materials, which react to temperature changes converting from liquid to solid and vice versa, is reflected in sculptures that could be both vestiges and fragments of an incomplete spatial narrative.This duality between the appearance of a ruin or an object in process reveals a latent tension between stability and fragility, between permanence and change, as well as between permeability and compactness.

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Carla Gimeno Jaria

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Less than Container Load

Curated by Carla Jimeno Jaria

NoguerasBlanchard Gallery

29/06/2023 – 28/07/2023

Art Nou Festival 2023

Photography by Roberto Ruiz