First Name

The artist says she has no idea what the exhibition is about, that she’s not interested in explaining it; that she will be completely caught up in the process until the day it opens and that it changes every day; that she herself hopes to understand it when it is mounted. Or perhaps not entirely. Because, even though she could try to explain, she believes that, at this moment in time, she must focus instead on the opposite direction: in regaining a sense of mystery.

Joana Cera (Barcelona, 1965) approaches sculpture from a material intuition that resonates with the Catalan conceptual tradition. Hard to classify and pigeonhole in neatly defined categories, her work is often found on the margins of what is happening now, in a time that brings Time itself into question and casts aspersions on consecutiveness and linearity.

Following this same course of action, in this exhibition Cera makes a return to stone as a recurrent means of expression in her practice. In recent years the artist has been using a combination of different materials and techniques that range from video or ceramic to ephemeral installations. In this multidisciplinary diversity her works are underpinned by references to a walkthrough in which every step counts and to a flow of ideas, endeavouring to penetrate the spirit of things through their presence, over and above what might be said about them. Over and above their enunciation.

In this ostensible muteness Cera’s works wish to bring out a synchrony between the primordial and the contemporary. Objects that seek a place for themselves in space even as they manage to convey the enigma of something very precise yet imperceptible.