WORKS ON DISPLAY

Laía Argüelles Folch’s project for MARCO brings together a group of works produced over the last 10 years, ranging from open-ended proposals and works-in-progress to very recent pieces. Artist’s books, suites, projects that use found photographs as their starting point, which are given new interpretations thanks to subtle interventions affecting texts and images, and produced in a whole variety of formats and printing techniques.

One could wind a guiding thread joining memory, time and space through the show’s more than twenty artworks – from Cómo vivir (an open-ended edition begun in 2014) to the most recent Una página, passing through La flâneuse, which encapsulates much of the artist’s intent, as does the box-book-viewer titled 210, not to mention the Todavía siempre suite, which gives this exhibition its name.

Cómo vivir [How to live], 2014, open edition [image on p. 2]
2014 Edition: typographic print on 300gr. paper.
2022 Edition: thermal print on 300gr. paper, 15 x 10.5 cm (postcard letter size)

In Breve ensayo sobre la carta (Temporal, 2021) [A Short Essay about a Letter] I wrote: “At the same time I began a project based on some verses by Wisława Szymborska, which I set in moveable types and printed on postcard-sized pieces of card. I started sending these postcards out ad hoc to friends, family and other similar relations. Since at the time, and at so many other times in my life, I was living away from home, the subject of nearness and distance, that is of contact, renewed its relevance every single day.

The people I wanted to ask about, who I wanted advice from about how to live, were far away. If they had been closer, I would not have asked them; with questions that are impossible to answer –or only possible when answering is forever put off– the power of its content is directly proportional to the discreetness of its form. Nevertheless, the circumstances led to it being proposed as a double attempt to break, and also keep, the distance: my request to receive a reply in letter form, and at the location written on the return address, implied that we should keep our distance”.

Una página [A page], 2024
Artist’s book. Flexographic print on Colorplan 350 gr. paper (outside) and Munken Pure Rough 300 gr. paper (inside). Edition of 150 numbered copies

The following can be read in the colophon of Una página: “One night I dreamt I held a book in my hands that my father had inscribed to me. As I opened it, I read this text at the end of the first page, written in his handwriting. Three lines in English, a language he does not know. Days later, after telling him my dream, I asked him to write down the sentence I had dreamt on a blank sheet of paper”.

La flâneuse, 2021
Artist’s book: 200 b&w photocopied pages, box hand bound by the artist and thermal printing

For a year I was accompanied at all times by a photograph –a street portrait of an unknown female pedestrian– from the 1920s. On my city strolls, every time I passed by a photocopiers, I would make photocopies of the aforesaid photograph both front and back, as though it were an identity card. A woman out strolling with a portrait of a woman out strolling, and so on. La flâneuse is an expression of walking, of company and a desire to identify, formalized in a 200 hundred page-long artist’s book that took a whole year to make, in the summers of 2020 and 2021: two hundred photocopies (all of them different) made at two hundred photocopiers (never the same) found by chance.

The archive as a corpus of all that circulation. Owing to the photocopy’s reiteration until exhaustion, and the accumulation of copies accompanying the city walks, this artwork is the recording of an extrapolation, that of the actual scene in the photograph. A woman who walks through the city is, thrice over, the photographer’s wife; as well as an artist herself, who explores the urban space in a kind of dreamt-of flâneuse connection; and, lastly, the artwork too, a furtherance of the walk through the shifting of the photograph reproduced page after page, never in the same place on the blank space of the page.

On the occasion of Todavía siempre exhibition at the museum, a 200-page facsimile version of La flâneuse has been installed as a display running through the gallery space, translating, in this manner, the act of walking into the gallery visits.

210, 2021
Artist’s book: 24 colour slides, natural light slide viewer and archival box. 24,5 x 20 x 10 cm

Opening a box like someone opening a door: the title on the lid, a replica in size, colour and letter type of the original sign at the entrance to the studio. Twenty-four slides made using film photography, a selection of images of Studio 210’s interior and its views, taken during a year’s residence at the Casa de Velázquez from 2020 to 2021. Together with a natural light slide viewer in an archival box, this work is, on the one hand, an exercise in recording and, on the other, about preservation itself, both of subject and form. Slides, as the most stable material medium for images, show themselves to the gaze when light shines through the viewer. Accordingly, without peripheral vision, with one eye shut and the other looking through the viewfinder, the gaze is immersed together with the whole body in a reappearing space and time.

Together with the artist’s book on display in the cabinet, the 24 slides of 210 are screened in loop for the first time at the exhibition, thus facilitating a complete view of the slides.

Todavía siempre, 2021
Found photographs, letter, note and telegrams. Suite of 7 diptychs. 32 x 44 cm each piece

Todavía siempre sets up through its mounting as a seven-piece polyptych, a criss-crossing dialogue between two kinds of expression (images and words) dealing with absence and disappearance. Taking inspiration from the aquatic setting of the Stygian lagoon, it displays photographs of bodies of water, isles or other far-off, inaccessible shores. Also appearing are floating bodies playing dead, sunsets and texts that reveal a loss or a farewell accompanying them.

The photographs and text communicate through the way they are framed, by means of jumps: each diptych is a proposal, but also a space occupied by them inside their frames and relating them to those other texts or photos to be found in the same place but in another diptych. In this manner, the entire polyptych is interconnected and allows the eye to jump freely from one part to another, endlessly. Behind it all is the difficulty of naming loss and the suspicion that, perhaps, it may only be suggested to a certain extent by its lacking, by what remains in its place.