HdM Gallery is pleased to present ‘A Tangled Tale', a solo exhibition of Marcel•la Barceló. Curated by Lucia Pesapane, the show will open on the 28th of April at THE POOL NYC, who are hosting us at their Milan gallery, and will remain open until 9th of May. As the gallery programme continues to expand, this exhibition marks an exciting step - growing beyond our existing locations, into new places and collaborations.
Curatorial statement by Lucia Pesapane:
Water is a key element in Marcel•la Barceló’s work. It flows through, seeps into and liquefies forms. A primordial, ambivalent and unstable element, it serves both as a 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 primordial 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 the artist’s practice.
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.
Here, nothing is premeditated: no preparatory sketches, no fixed 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 reflects 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—whether from nightmares or dreams—can flow freely without restraint.
