Untitled, 2021

MDF and agglomerated board.
13 x 13 x 13 cm
12 + 1 PA

Irma Álvarez-Laviada has been working for years in the filed of expanded painting base from different proposals where the languages that the artist had been developing up to the moment -which have always revolved around the concept of emptiness and its relationship with disciplines such as paint, sculpture or architecture- become independent from traditional supports to seek relationship of inversion with the materials.

The piece presented here appropriates the aesthetics of standardized material samples, like MDF, commonly used by companies and manufacturers in the distribution and marketing of this type of industrial products.

A small base/pedestal is built by superimposing different MDF and chipboard plates­ that, beyond asserting itself in its condition of supporting an object or physical element, puts the point of attention precisely on the opposite idea: in the absence of the object, launching us into a descriptive version of its own materiality and absence as a possible narrative, thus accentuating the idea of support. The choice of MDF responds to an interest in its markedly constructive character; it is a material typical of the field of architecture destined to assume layers, making a use of it that ends up canceling its material characteristics. In this piece the material is shown, showing it raw, without intervening, through a formalization that tries to respect some physical properties that reveal its industrial origin.

Both the work methodology and the process appeal to the potentiality of these materials, to their possibility of being and thinking from their condition of matter, a matter that is no longer characterized by what is particular and epidermal in it, but by what it is deeper and more concrete, becoming a substantive part of logical thought when it is re-articulated from the creative field.