Mimetic
Exercises
2014-2023
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Mimetic Exercises is a project made up of several series created in collaboration with the artist Alejandría Cinque (Madrid, 1990), with whom I have occasionally worked since 2014. Our collaborative work delves into the archetypes of conventional art history genres, such as still life or portraiture, with a specific focus on color, the interplay between images, tradition versus contemporaneity, and the juxtaposition of the Academia with the playful.
Collaboration project with Alejandría Cinque
After completing the series Mimetic Exercises I (2014) – during which Alejandría dyed his hair over six months while I created a series of still lifes in dialogue with him – we were invited to participate in a residency at DDZ Studio with the aim of exploring still life from an experimental perspective. The result of our work there was the series Mimetic Exercises II (2017)
In Mimetic Exercises II (2017) we reinterpreted paintings from the Prado Museum collection from a domestic perspective. By establishing a dialectical relationship between past images and contemporary codes, and using different objects and ourselves as models, we transformed the symbols of death and the passage of time from the Vanitas into ironic, playful, and absurd images that simultaneously convey the ghostly presence of our culture and inherited morality.
In 2022 we were invited to participate at the exhibition La casa como reflejo en un espejo, curated by Henan Xin at the Sala de Arte Joven de la Comunidad de Madrid. For this exhibition, we carried out the series Mimetic Exercises III, an installation in which we used the gesture of offering a glass of water as the backbone of all the pieces.
On one hand, we reinterpreted Goya's La maja desnuda through a performance in which a naked body rests on a pedestal filled with towers of glasses like a veil of glass that distorts its skin. A sound piece records the sounds that emerge from the contact with the performer's skin, creating a cozy atmosphere through the intimate act of moistening someone else's skin. While offering a glass of water is a courteous act when inviting a stranger into a private space, the action of washing someone else's body implies a level of intimacy that goes beyond social norms.
On the other hand, we reflected on how the intimacy of home is often threatened by contemporary housing circumstances. Two photographs symbolically and psychologically represent the desired home as a system on the verge of collapsing, one's own space on the brink of fading away. These aseptic images present objects not as certainties but as devices charged with poetic possibilities, with no more artifice than their own materiality and their disposition in the empty, unreal space of the still life
