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Tanta Lejanía
Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno-CAAMImage: Helen Acosta, "Verrückt vor," 2023. Thread on velvet. 130 x 160 cm. Photography: Bruno Helbling
From December 19th, 2023, to May 26th, 2024
This exhibition by Helen Acosta is the first in Spain dedicated broadly to the Canarian artist based in Switzerland. Her works exhibit a characteristic that runs through each piece, each series, regardless of the specific theme: subtlety. Acosta explores in her artistic corpus that delicacy that emanates from the least perceptible, from what we can barely see or recognize, yet it resides in our memory and in our life experiences. There is much life in these works because the artist invites us to relive those ephemeral sensations that accompanied us once but are important.
In "So much distance," the Duchampian concept of the infra-light underlies, the idea that beauty is present in the contingent, in the poetics of disappearance, in the very possibility that something may happen... or not. Fragility as a precious aesthetic and object of art itself is a component found in the works presented here for the first time, dialoguing with each other and spanning decades of Acosta's work.
Against the demands of an exhausting present, her creations invite us to reconsider the beauty of the everyday, of the almost imperceptible, albeit laden with emotions. Acosta's work is a commitment to beauty, care, delicacy, and the affective. Contrary to the stereotype that femininity is "sensitive" (as if this were something pejorative), works like this should be advocated by men and women, precisely because they are a counterpoint to a globalized capitalist, extractive, and patriarchal world that has not paid attention to the beauty of the small. "So much distance" avoids the visual saturation that invades our screens and our daily lives. Here, above all, there is rest.
Semíramis González