Artists: Alex Reynolds, Cristina Spinelli, Nora Aurrekoetxea and Ran Zhang. Curator: Sonia Fernández Pan 

Romantic Bullets Position Effectively is an exhibition that emerges from the confluence of desire and intuition. A succession of elastic gestures imprecisely connect one twist to another from the works and artists that are part of the exhibition. The notion of “twist”, in English, appeared early in the process, remaining present and acquiring body over time by paying attention to an anecdotal image: the memory of a twisted ice cream that still exists but has disappeared. As a fleeting object, this ice cream brings forth a material torsion that melts but cannot be satisfactorily untangled. This material paradox includes the twisted within the twist, enveloping a concept with a transitory image.

Thanks to a methodology based on connections and sensitive findings Romantic Bullets Position Effectively begins to come to life with Ran Zhang’s Resolution of Traits 3, where the artist builds fictitious objects around a protein structure to show a molecular reality that cannot be seen but needs a visual experience to be understood. Ran is interested in the motor proteins that are responsible for converting chemical energy into mechanical work within many organisms, allowing us not only to move, but also to see. From this work I invite Cristina Spinelli with her piece Untitled, which proposes a material journey back and forth through the corn plant. It is detached from its “original” body to become bioplastic and acquire again aesthetic qualities and vegetal patterns. The continuous serialization and reproducibility, characteristic of industrial processes, are also part of what we call nature, making use of the planet as a great laboratory of “the artificial”. Palais, by Alex Reynolds, unfolds the project towards the endless and alienating material dimension of bureaucracy. Through a series of clandestine forays into the enormous and disturbing Palais de Justice in Brussels, Alex documents in first person the intricacies, the ruins, the elevators, corridors and different floors of a building as labyrinthine as it is spectral. It both contains and conceals the ordinary reality of bureaucracy within the imposing symbolic and effective power of institutional architecture. Nora Aurrekoetxea’s Besoa, Klit, Lepokoa and Trentza come together in Romantic Bullets Position Effectively to stop without concluding an intuitive drift of gestures and twists connected through the presence and constituent materiality of the works. Nora’s four braided pieces produce stable forms for the intimacy of gestures that arise from the habit of the provisional and perishable. Creating a system of relationships that also includes the continuous exchanges between the natural and the artificial, both in their form and material qualities, Besoa, Klit, Lepokoa and Trentza return to the initial impulse of this intuitive curatorial process of gestures and indirect organic links that suggests a circular structure for other possible directions.

Sonia Fernández Pan