Untitled, 2021 / Irma Álvarez-Laviada

Description

Untitled, 2021

MDF and chipboard
13 x 13 x 13 cm
12 + 1 PA

Irma Álvarez-Laviada has been working for years in the field of expanded painting from different proposals where the languages that the artist had been developing until then, which have always revolved around the concept of emptiness and its relationship with disciplines such as painting, sculpture or architecture, become independent of traditional media to seek a relationship of investment with the materials.

The piece presented here appropriates the aesthetics of the standardized material samples, such as DM, commonly used by companies and manufacturers in the distribution and commercialization of this type of industrial products.

By superimposing different MDF and chipboard sheets, a small pedestal is built which, beyond affirming its condition of supporting an object or physical element, places the focus on the opposite idea: on 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 DM responds to an interest in its marked constructive character; it is a material typical of the field of architecture destined to assume layers, making a use of it that ends up annulling its material characteristics. In this piece, the material is shown raw, without intervention, through a formalization that tries to respect 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 being thought from their condition of matter, a matter that is no longer characterized by what it is in particular and epidermal, but by what is deeper and more concrete in it, becoming a substantive part of logical thinking when it is re-articulated from the creative field.