Rosalía Banet’s work constitutes a plastic investigation on the body as a place of conflict, symbolic archive and space exposed to the tensions of desire, illness and consumption. From painting to sculpture, drawing or installation, Banet configures an imaginary where the body ceases to be a unit to reveal itself as a fragment.
His iconography is based on a very recognizable aesthetic with flat colors, textures and rounded shapes. But he does not intend to focus on the playful, but to draw the viewer’s attention and destabilize his gaze. Under that friendly layer emerges the monstrous; organs, Siamese twins, duplicated, deformed, expanded bodies… The body with which Banet works is not anatomical or idealized, but the body of excess, of anxiety, of trauma. A body constantly altered, intervened and redrawn.
In this exhibition, `Mutant Bodies’, Rosalía seeks to question the construction of identity, rethinking the limits of the body. Fragmented bodies, bodily fragility and uprooting of nature that puts us in front of a mirror in which we recognize ourselves as a contemporary society. Her interest does not lie in representing diverse bodies, but in thinking of the body as a mutable entity, traversed by the social, the political and the affective. The body, in her work, speaks to us of hunger (physiological, emotional, cultural), of guilt or pleasure. It is presented as a colonized and commodified space but also as a disputed territory. It is a call for attention.
The exhibition is articulated around a central table where, as a landscape, Rosalía proposes a series of works in which the body decomposes and transforms itself, questioning its own limits as a space and in relation to the environment. A broken relationship from the moment that, as a society, we move away from nature. Two series focus on this idea; Homo Humus and Totéms (Rebirths) that allude to this uprooting of the human being with the earth symbolized by segmented and empty feet in the first series and others that sprout flowers in the second. Feet that move away from the earth and die, but at the same time generate new life. A transformation, a new life, which leads us to another of the series in which cakes of seeds and legumes (a project carried out in Mexico on Coatlicue, Mexican goddess of the earth and fertility) reflect the idea of a better future through change.
Thus, Banet does not propose a tragic vision, but a lucid one: under the grotesque, the idea. In each cut, drawing and sculpture, the background of the Galician artist’s work can be observed. Her work becomes a field of forces; between the biological and the symbolic, the individual and the collective, the intimate and the political. The body, in Banet, is not represented, but transformed to make us reflect.
[Rodrigo Carreño Río]
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