melanie
isabel
garcía
Neven, London | 25 April – 31 May 2025
Exhibition text by Melanie Isabel García
Scatter Symphony
Prelude
20 October 2021. I had just come out of your old studio on Bethnal Green Road when I began reading ‘Agua viva’ (1973) by Clarice Lispector. I wrote your name beside the epigraph.
“There must be a kind of painting totally free of the dependence on the figure—or the object—which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence.”
–Michel Seuphor
25 April – 31 May 2025
Installation view
25 April – 31 May 2025
Installation view
25 April – 31 May 2025
Installation view
‘Candy pink and black square’, 2025
‘Black and sand scribbles’, 2025 (detail)
‘Yellow brush stroke’, 2025
‘Black and sand scribbles’, 2025
25 April – 31 May 2025
Installation view
Conversations unfold chaotic, unruly, woven in real time as ideas ebb and flow, and words wrap (or not) around them. Tense draws back and forth while location shifts from past to present to future. From here to there in an instant, storylines clash, mesh, and blur together. A conversation is a wormhole, and ours is now ten years old.
In our latest call, we circled the same topics as always. Domestic life, anxiety, fragility, the rain. The hegemony of memory and how ours are forever stamped by abstract geometry. Venezuela and Alejandro Otero always seem to find their way in. We spoke of overwhelming chaos looming to no foreseeable end, the only sane responses being radical acceptance, subtle subversion, and the ventilation of friendly chat.
You tell me you want me to write about your new series of works. You say you had intuitively decided to reproduce these moments from photos you had on your phone; stills of your own clothes drying off the ocean water, hanging on the towel rails in your bathroom by the beach. You cannot yet fully articulate what they are or what they mean. The origin of an idea can often be elusive, but following the threads back towards its beginnings has always been a passion of mine.
We remark that these ladder-shaped radiators are commonplace enough in Europe, but nowhere to be seen back home. Conjuring up warmth to dry clothes in Venezuela is a nuisance; the sun does all the work. You mention a video someone recorded from inside their car while passing through Avenida Libertador, one of the main avenues in our mutual hometown. It functions more as an artery, connecting the hustle of downtown Caracas to Altamira, the part of the city that birthed us both and saw us leave at the cusp of childhood and adolescence. The street slopes down into an open tunnel, flanked by walls proud with a mural of stacked rectangular modules, tilted slightly back and forth. Orange, black, white, gray, and yellow. If luck strikes just right, the sky is blue, and the car can speed past.
From the casual optical illusions of Caracas, we dive into your desire to flatten the three-dimensional, to paint with sculpture. For years, we have been speaking about your use of clothes as brushstrokes, as ways to make lines. In tension with the fabrics forever wet, immortalised in resin, there is a sense that the work is now starting to dry, like a fossil. I mention that zooming into these ladder shapes and hanging textiles, where the fibres of the clothes meet the chrome bars of the radiators, there is a microscopic grid. [Just by saying this, as if caught by non-induced psychedelia or science fiction, I suddenly take a trip into it].
In a more obvious way, though, this new body of work seems to be your most abstract, geometric attempt yet. You vaguely recall an essay you read once in pre-grad that you say has been a major influence on you. Something about magic in John MacCracken’s sculptures, something about a mirage. The allure of minimalism has sat with you all these years—you have always been able to see that behind such calculated material structures hides something much more profound, universal even. But you have had no luck in finding the text. You must still be under the effect of the recent eclipse, you say, your memory has been so hazy lately. This essay sounds so mystical that I can’t help to side-Google while you continue talking, but my audacity yields no successful results, so I take a guess: “Was it by Rosalind Krauss?”. My mind was also a bit cloudy, but evidently her essays, ‘The Optical Unconscious’ and ‘Grids’, are ingrained somewhere deep within me. [Again, the grid revealed itself in passing, haunting our conversation, proving its presence, lodged in a mysterious, inaccessible place].
The bars of the radiators also remind you of a musical pentagram, and something about your mention of sheet music makes me urge you to listen to Philip Glass. Not knowing exactly what strange impulse led me to say that, once we hang up, I search for an album of his to play in the background while I collect my thoughts. Perhaps it was just synchronicity in full effect or the most literary part of my memory recalling the fact that (of course) Philip Glass wrote a song called ‘The Grid’. It was written as part of the score for a documentary called ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ (1982). I press play and start to write.
Interlude
taptaptaptap
slick slip splat
scat whisk wash whoosh rush mush swirl swing crack
blare sssshhhh ah, awe
poof strum hum hung droop dry stride flow splash wet
slick split splat
slick slip splat
scat whisk wash whoosh rush mush swirl swing crack
blare sssshhhh ah, awe
poof strum hum hung droop dry stride flow splash wet
slick split splat
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