Natalia Domínguez has been trying to answer this question for some years: how to capture a cloud? Hence her fixation on the air, where to remain in suspension, where, perhaps, to fall. She approaches air as an element that is difficult to define, both formally and conceptually. Although he is aware of the impossibility of this gesture, he insists. And this fixation is not childish, it is a question about the instant, about language and about the changing nature of our context. Whether from a formal approach or from a symbolic search, he seeks to make the apparently imperceptible present, by means of echo or reverberation.

On this occasion, rather than a cloud, we could speak of vapour, of smoke, of a heavy, humid, sticky air, typical of a contemporary imaginary that is less and less science fiction. At the bottom of the space, on the ground, we find a formless, vibrant, iridescent animal whose nature is difficult to grasp, almost like a crawling cyborg. The urban environment is the habitat of this organism, just as it is the habitat of the ventilation pipes we see everywhere, which also breathe, condense steam, inhale and exhale, surrounded by totally industrial elements. If the steam stands out for its deformity and adaptability, the tube contrasts with its rotund presence, sculptural in its most classical sense.

A deep, rhythmic exhalation, which gradually accelerates, at times nervous, choppy, an anguished shortness of breath that becomes more and more present... With this contemporary sensation of lack of air, which is subtly hinted at in the title of the exhibition, we enter the habitat of these creatures. The lack of evidence of the interdependent relationships that condition the existence of almost any organism. Air, in this case, could be understood as an environment of interrelation, of connection between inside and outside, between the different singularities that cohabit a given place, in this case, the exhibition space.

The latter is dominated by a large sculpture that unfolds its indeterminate form in the middle of the fall and acts as a bridge to the ST (parachute) series on which she has been working since 2022. The artist thus traces a link with her previous production, where air continues to be a central element, although the material vocabulary she deploys here, the formal and conceptual approach, is much more abstract and subtle than in previous proposals. The use of materials with organic animal reminiscences, at the same time traversed by the notion of the technical or of security, such as the quilts, or the raw iron finishes, reveal a bodily approach throughout the proposal.

The bodily, personal experience of the urban environment leads the artist to ask herself collective questions, questions that interrogate a context in which the processes of transformation from raw material to processed material accelerate contemporary models of production, distribution and accumulation. Where those prefabricated, industrial, mass-distributed elements draw the capitalist landscape.

Text by Elena Blesa Cábez

Mediator and researcher