Laía Argüelles, many hands for the peculiar

Vigo,

Regulars at Barcelona’s Chiquita Room are familiar with Laía Argüelles, an artist from Zaragoza whose work combines words and images: she has studied Translation and Interpretation and Philosophy as well as Fine Arts and is interested in exploring the confluences of photography and language; she often seeks out old materials and snapshots to explore the possibilities of constructing meanings through their intervention and montage, of visually translating experiences or of using imagination as a tool for knowledge.

Until next November, and under the curatorship of Laura González Palacios and María Seoane, this author presents “Still always” at MARCO. Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo, a review of her projects from the last decade made using those materials found in second-hand bookshops, flea markets and collectors’ shops in various countries (she has lived in the United Kingdom, Iceland and Germany, as well as in Spain). Focusing on their materiality, on what it means to hoard what is used and find meaning in repetition, in the folding and unfolding of what is used, Argüelles delves into the basic nature of images, even those closest to us, in their propositional character of open and changing readings and in the complexity of their very essence: they constitute representations, they cannot shelter complete identities and, in any case, they enrich our capacity to conceive reality.

The exhibition is titled after a polyptych, made in 2021 and made up of seven pieces, which features photographs of bodies of water, islets or shores that seem inaccessible, all of them evocative of the Styx lagoon, one of the four aquifers of the underground world that, it is said, passes through the deepest part of hell; also of bodies that float, as when we pretend to be dead on the beach. These images dialogue with texts that point to farewells or losses through a montage structured in jumps: the space they occupy within their frame links them to other textual fragments or photos that are integrated into the same work but remain in another diptych. In this way, all the components of this polyptych, including words, are connected to each other and the viewer’s eye must jump from one to the other, without finishing outlining all the possible relationships.

Still always invites the public to reflect on the difficulty of naming what is lost and painful and on the suspicion that what has already disappeared can only be suggested in what later takes its place.

Laía Argüelles Folch. La flâneuse (detail), 2021

The artist’s book dates from the same year. The flâneuse. The artist was accompanied, at all times for twelve months, by a century-old print of an anonymous woman, a city stroller. She made two hundred photocopies of that photograph, in as many copy shops as she could find, and none of them were exactly the same: these reproductions now make up the aforementioned book, which has been produced by many people and its facsimile has been displayed at MARCO, so that the viewer can emulate the model and walk around her. This proposal is completed with three photogravures that replicate the location of the images in the first three photocopies of the book.

Argüelles thus generates an archive from a vast circulation and record derived from a triple extrapolation: the protagonist of the initial photograph, a woman walking through a city, who apart from herself in 1920 symbolically embodies the artist, flâneuse which identifies with it, and a walk that is appealed to through the displacement of the scene reproduced page by page, never in the same place on the blank space of the paper.

Another artist’s book in the exhibition is 201composed of two dozen slides made from analogue photographs that show the interior of the artist’s studio during her residency, between 2020 and 2021, at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, and its views. Arranged next to a backlit viewer in a conservation box, this project is both an exercise in recording and another in preservation in form and matter, because the slides, which are still the most stable material support for the image, reveal themselves to the eye when the light passes through the viewer: without peripheral vision, with one eye closed and the other in the viewer, our eye is immersed in a different space and time. It is the first time that the Aragonese artist has presented these scenes in full.

The interior and the exterior converge, equally, in Imaginary week-end maisons (2018-2021), about weekend house projects whose fundamental construction elements, as well as the type of room or the distribution of space, coincide with some interior photographs to the point of suggesting that they could be the same place.

One of the earliest projects in Vigo is How to livea 2014 edition extended in 2022 based on verses by Wisława Szymborska composed with movable type and printed on postcard-sized cardboard that Argüelles sent to family, friends and those close to him when he lived outside Spain; some of them referred to the question of closeness and distance and can lead us to reconsider which issues we address and which we don’t with those who are close to us, and what ways we use to raise the most intense ones.

On recovered passe-partout he shows us As I would like to remember (2022), a work in which she uses a traditional image medium to refer precisely to the material absence of the image or to the inability of that medium to faithfully reconstruct the memory. The interior figurations, those of memory, are not merely representative for the author, but the result of a set of experiences that are almost impossible to transfer to a single scene.

From dream to reality leads us the most recent of his works, One page (2024), which contains a text handwritten by the artist’s father. In his words: One night I dreamed that I was holding a book that my father had dedicated to me. When I opened it, I read this text at the bottom of the first page, written in his handwriting on three lines and in English – a language he does not know. A few days later, after telling him about my dream, I asked him to write on a blank sheet of paper the phrase that I had dreamed.. Like postcards to many hands How to livethis leaf offers an imprint that is difficult to replicate.