María Jesús González y Patricia Gómez. Espejo del mundo. Galería 1 Mira Madrid

Madrid,

Six years ago, the duo of Valencian artists formed by María Jesús González and Patricia Gómez participated in one of the group exhibitions of the initiative Commissioner wanted of the Community of Madrid: they showed Ena Housean installation that already exemplified their destructive archaeological practice; They had wallpapered what was Ramón Acín’s house in Valencia, and a meeting place for intellectuals, and then ripped the paper off the walls, taking with it a part of the layer of the underlying wall. That project consisted of half a thousand printed panels, evidently loaded with history and stories, in which the idea of ​​canonical reconstruction of the past could be easily altered, simply if the viewer decided not to follow the order and specific numbering in their contemplation. of each fragment of paper in relation to its original layout. Furthermore, the random or purposefully modified placement of these panels could generate new stories, bringing speculation into play in the area of ​​the ruin.

That same year 2018, González and Gómez were among the winners of the contest Unpublished from La Casa Encendida; There they brought a tapestry composed of the iconography that the prisoners who passed through the Modelo prison in their city displayed in their cells, counting the days left until their release or capturing signs of their nostalgia for outside life.

They are two of the most significant proposals of the work that these authors have been carrying out, for more than fifteen years, in the rescue and recording of the memory of abandoned spaces, a long-term work that has also taken them to detention centers. for already disused foreigners or uninhabited houses in rural areas and which is now growing with the exhibition, in Gallery 1 Mira Madrid, of “Mirror of the world”, a proposal started in 2017 and focused on the daily life of the inmates in which it was the last Psychiatric Hospital of Valencia, the current Mental Health Hospital of Bétera. In its first meaning, it remained active from 1973 until the mid-eighties, when its pavilions began to be gradually emptied as a result of the dehospitalization of these patients enacted by the Psychiatric Reform, in favor of the establishment of mental health units.

María Jesús González and Patricia Gómez. Mirror of the world. Gallery 1 Look at Madrid

Starting once again from the walls of what was a mental asylum, the artists have developed a new process of searching and collecting traces of life that refer both to the history of the place (and of psychiatric care in our country, a reflection of the prosperity and failures of the social system itself and of our consideration as a community towards this problem) as well as the daily life and living conditions of those who occupied their rooms, those small facts that can have the same relevance as the large ones when preparing the chronicle of a past if it is assumed that nothing that happened can be considered lost to history.

The subaltern stories, the call intrahistoryare the axis of Gómez and González’s production, which have stopped in very diverse locations, public and private, of political, social, economic or religious relevance, but normally in a state of greater or lesser abandonment, not intending to find in them echoes of official history, but of that of anonymous people, whom they do not study as a homogeneous group, as a mass or collective, but rather taking into account their individual testimonies. They understand that each voice is autonomous, derives from a particular baggage and sometimes emerges, as a desire, lament or revealed secret, in the form of an inscription or plastic trace on the walls.

María Jesús González and Patricia Gómez. Mirror of the world. Gallery 1 Look at Madrid
María Jesús González and Patricia Gómez. Mirror of the world. Gallery 1 Look at Madrid

The one in Bétera, in Campo de Turia, was projected in the seventies as one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in Europe (it had 1,200 beds at its inauguration) and it has taken them five years to explore its walls, which at first they literally extracted from the sanatorium to then analyze its possible content. What they found opened new paths for them, which have to do with the very title of this exhibition: they realized that there were many mirrors distributed throughout the Hospital pavilions, some for common use (in the bathrooms) and others for individual use; They decided to photograph each room from its reflection in said mirrors and then make them their own, in order to generate the montage that we now see, based on the relationship between those mirrors and the images of the interiors that they projected for many years and of the people who looked there, contemplating around them the progressive decrepitude of the place and, perhaps, their own, which is now also that of the visitors to the gallery.

María Jesús González and Patricia Gómez. Mirror of the world. Gallery 1 Look at Madrid

The title of the exhibition also refers, as Ángel Calvo Ulloa points out, to the essay by Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha The ghost of the worldwhich alludes to inmates in hospices as condemned to live on the other side of the mirror, and to Foucault’s analysis of the Praise of madness by Erasmus (The symbol of madness will henceforth be the mirror that, without reflecting anything real, will secretly reflect, for those who look in it, the dream of their presumption. Madness does not have so much to do with the truth and the world, as with man and the truth of himself, which he knows how to perceive.).

In Bétera, that mirror of the world is corroded partitions, canvases with layers of dirt, fragments of wall that sometimes resemble windows but that suggest closure (blows, scratches) and a notion of time very different from the one that anyone outside of the city could have. From those walls, it flowed with him. They also evoke, however far from them, the signs and tonalities of the informalist compositions or those of the images, also based on street walls, of Dubuffet or Brassaï: there may be in the plaster some type of universal language, with its dialects. .

María Jesús González and Patricia Gómez. Mirror of the world. Gallery 1 Look at Madrid

María Jesús González and Patricia Gómez. Mirror of the world. Gallery 1 Look at Madrid

María Jesús González and Patricia Gómez. “Mirror of the world”

GALLERY 1 MIRA MADRID

C/ Argumosa 16, lower right

Madrid

From September 12 to November 2, 2024

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