LAURA LIO. El sendero recibido. Caminar hacia lo abierto. Curated by Pedro Medina

From 17 March to 4 June, 2023

Palacio Quintanar

Calle San Agustín, s/n. Segovia, Spain

Based on a text by María Zambrano, El camino recibido, which invites us to reflect on our relationship with inherited thought, paths that we will widen as we travel them, the exhibition recreates a particular nomadic experience, not always chosen, as is the case with the exiles that have crossed history up to the present day. The artist Laura Lio internally assumes this contemporary condition and transforms it into a singular exercise of poetic reason.

In this light, her work appears to be propitiated by astonishment and temperance, by the paths of research, but also of inspiration, with which she weaves translucent membranes for a reality that does not allow itself to be totally trapped. Indeed, he suspects that in everything there always remains a veiled part, a remnant that resists a definitive form, for all reality is inexhaustible, and in it remains the enigma of experience as an inextinguishable happening.

Hence, the exhibition at the Palacio Quintanar displays a rich gallery of graphic, installation and audiovisual resources, the fruit of Laura Lio's continuous experimentation. In this way, traces, anatomical cartographies, books, tondos, posters and reverberations of forms give way to murmurs, the noise of voices and gestures as a new means of communication. They are drifts in search of a collective voice that will ultimately propitiate that shared clamour that is present in posters that yearn for other perspectives. In the end, it will be the texts taken from the street, those substrata of life and time, that will mark the beginning and end of a chorus that refers us to the outside, to the public and to a rebellion against the normalised commonplace.

The path then points to "the openness", which recalls Rilke's eighth Elegy, just the one that precedes the "time of what can be said", the power of naming being destined for the poet. The artist confirms this in the book Spores with the following words: "Spreading fears across the field / to stay out in the open / without justification or shelter / without past / or shelter / in front of a wide horizon / to stay there". It is like the unforeseen rain, before which to run or with which to melt in order to extract its immaculate lymph, confident that it will fertilise the earth. She then throws herself fearlessly into the elements, beyond the narrowness of the present, certain of negotiating with the sky and the sun the passage to a new day.

As a whole, the exhibition gravitates around personal experiences to ultimately illuminate the emergence of new clamours oriented towards the collective, represented by the many posters in El sendero recibido. Caminar hacia lo abierto. Not only is it due to Laura Lio's current moment of creation and curatorship, which orbits around graphic expression (editions made by artists and which take shape as printed materials: books, magazines or posters), but it also makes extraordinarily visible a scene where the artist's vital principles emerge, at the same time as poetic devices of a critique that is still in process.

Ultimately, reality can only be perceived as something unfinished, immersed in incessant change. For this reason, it encourages us to leave our refuge, to communicate with others and to seek a shared voice.

Laura Lio is dedicated to plastic creation, exploring the common territory between image, poetic word and sound. This artist is known for her sculptural career and her actions in the public space, specific projects that dialogue spatially and poetically with the architecture and memory of the place. In addition, she has also developed an intense creative work on paper (drawings, graphic arts and artist's books), as shown in El sendero recibido. Caminar hacia lo abierto.

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