THE POOL NYC is happy to host HdM Gallery, presenting A Tangled Tale, the first solo exhibition of Marcel·la Barceló in Milan. Curated by Lucia Pesapane, the exhibition will be open from April 28th to May 8th.
 

A Tangled Tale

Water is  key element in Marcel·la Barceló’s work. It flows through, seeps into and liquefies forms. A primordial, ambivalent and unstable, it serves both as  visual motif and a conceptual principle that runs through her pictorial practice. 

A source of life as much as a force of destruction, water is conceived as a matrix: we come from it, we carry it within us, and yet it remains an environment in which we cannot live. 
This juxtaposition is fundamental to her.

In many cosmologies, water represents the primordial chaos from which the world  materialises. Much of Marcel·la Barceló’s practice develops from this view. Her figures  seem to emerge from an initial magma that she often compares to the birth of Venus as  recounted by Hesiod: a mixture of foam, blood and semen. 

Nothing is premeditated in her canvas: no preparatory sketches, no  composition.  Materials come together, blend, and clash. Stains spread, drips branch off, and chance  takes the lead. Some shapes disappear; others endure. The painting becomes a field of  metamorphoses where nothing is ever entirely static. This fluid approach is also evident  in the brushwork. The rolling lines, curves and movements evoke the surface of water  rippled by the wind. The depths of the sea interact with the infinity of the sky; foam and  clouds seem to be part of the same shifting matter. 

Everything is in flux.

Marcel·la Barceló thus explores the contrast where the spatiality of water meets that  of dry land. This line of contact — horizon or shoreline— frequently appears in her  paintings, but the artist does not merely depict it; on the contrary, she seeks to disrupt  it. If the earth embodies the principles of stability and rationality, Marcel·la Barceló  proposes to flood this conceptual framework and adopt a different perspective; to  conceive of our relationship with the world not from the solidity of the earth, but from  the fluidity of water – viewing the earth from the sea. On the surface of the water, the  visible world refl cts and distorts into unstable images, merging with the invisible that  swarms beneath the surface.

Like Narcissus confronting his own reflection, the viewer is drawn in. Invited to cross  that iridescent surface and step into another world — the one hidden on the other side of  the mirror, as imagined by Lewis Carroll, to whom the exhibition’s title, A Tangled Tale,  pays homage. The short stories written between 1880 and 1885 by the British author and  collected under this title are constructed as a series of puzzles to be unravelled, creating a  labyrinthine narrative. This non-linear thinking is reflected in the artist’s universe, made  up of networks and interweaving threads: a world that is both familiar and inaccessible,  where every thread of one story becomes entangled with another, and where every story  may become a puzzle. 

But in Marcel·la Barceló’s Eden, unease never ceases. A line twists; a tree branch  transforms into a vortex. A wolf lurks somewhere. Dragonflies and birds of enormous  proportions appear, menacing. 

Reality eventually cracks, and water can flow freely without restraint.