Looking inside | Gemma Alpuente

“Months in which painting felt like an idyllic pursuit, replacing routine with the tireless removal of accumulated mud that impregnated every possession in the studio and the dwelling, turning it into an unhealthy place. Isolation, attending to the designated areas to obtain food from the army, documenting the situation for administrative procedures, but also to make the cultural sector visible and, with unexpected repercussions, appearing in the media amidst that emotional whirlwind. Assimilating a paradigm shift bathed in uncertainty; but amidst all this, the chaos, the disaster, I decided I couldn't go on without painting. I created a parenthesis, brief but with the capacity to oxygenate my lungs and feel like myself again. I took my materials, still with traces of mud. I went to the industrial estate turned vehicle graveyard, next to one of the military camps, and on the still biting cracked mud layer, I cut a fragment of canvas and painted this work. I had a hunch that it would be exhibited in a special place. A few weeks later, I received a call from the Chirivella Soriano Foundation, and everything fell into place” “I was clear that I would record it with a drone to capture the aerial view. Within the chaos, I am capable of recognizing the natural beauty of my surroundings. In this case, the contrast was something I needed to record for myself, to see myself from the outside, to understand what I was doing. After the intervention, after the image dump, a card error caused the loss of all audiovisual material. I was left with the artwork, but not its complete context, so although I managed to recover some frames with technical help, I thought I had to create a second piece and record everything again. Thus, two works emerged in the same context. This piece was exhibited at the Chirivella Soriano Foundation for the exhibition “After the Dana, poetics of resilience”, and its production was partly subsidized by it.””