TAN FUERTE Y TAN FRÁGIL COMO UN NUDO QUE FLOTA
Galería Arte A Ciegas, Madrid, ES
28.03 - 21.05.2025

TAN FUERTE Y TAN FRÁGIL COMO UN NUDO QUE FLOTA (AS STRONG AND AS FRAGILE AS A FLOATING KNOT)

Guest Curator: Omar-Pascual Castillo

Artists: María Ortega & Cristina Ortega

Curatorially, this exhibition emerges as a three-voice dialogue. The voices of its protagonists: María Ortega and Cristina Ortega, and the voice of a guest curator. From this external, peripheral perspective, we have envisioned it metaphorically as the symbolic construction of a territory through art, an island adrift in the vast ocean. Like the “fatal plastic islands” that invade our seas; but this time, as ecosystemic islands of memory, fabrics, and threads. Because it is textile work, its ancestral knowledge held in women’s hands, and the weight of its legacy, that binds them as worthy heirs of Velázquez’s The Spinners.
Although, to be clear, this is not a tribute to him, but to them.

When discussing the rise of Textile Art in recent decades, hundreds of female artists come to the fore those who have drawn on ancient feminine traditions where textiles are both the medium and the purpose of their practice. They have developed a contemporary imaginary that ultimately becomes a new symbolic network of interwoven relationships. Perhaps this serves as a material response to the patriarchal academic representation, always distant, external that Velázquez established as canon in his magnificent painting The Spinners. To be fair, the work is masterful, and it reveals a closeness to femininity from the Sevillian master that overflow with respect, admiration, and even love.
It is from that love evoked by the art of spinning that the work of María Ortega and Cristina Ortega emerges. Though they share a surname and, evidently, their condition as contemporary women, they are two quite different examples of how to approach the act of creation from and through the language provided by textiles as material, as artisanal exercise, and as a result in which the art object takes firm shape in its tactile softness, always handmade.
With an extensive body of work that includes spatial installations, sculptural objects, tapestries, embroidered papers, and multi-print systems on textile supports, master artist María Ortega, in this instance, offers us an approach to landscape from a sensory perspective. Here, the sense of color sets the rules of a narrative dynamic in which the liquid element is what connects us. Perhaps because it is the natural element that surrounds us as a species—along with all the organisms and life forms on Earth—her work reflects on how to honor the Mother Water Goddess. The Yoruba would call her Yemayá, the Kikongo, Kalunga (if we think in African references, now so trendy in these “decolonial re-significations”); from whom all planetary life originated.

More information: www.galeriadearteaciegas.com