Maria Leon 15º 45º 75º 90º

Traces of Truths and the Mediated Surface
Text Kate Brown
At the peripheries of an iron frame, newsprint clippings
dangle precariously, threatening to fall into the negative
space that blooms between its perpendicular bars. María
León’s sculpture »NWIO« could be an editor’s table, a
skeletal remnant from a disaster or an apocalypse. Around
the frame, information lingers on the edge of extinction.
Largely dedicated to mining the formal and symbolic potentialities
of newsprint media, the work of the Spanish artist
investigates its own materiality by way of destruction and
fragmentation, questioning the looming obsolescence of
the medium itself. León’s works embody a profound quiet, as
though they exist in the stillness of an aftermath.
Aftermath of what, exactly? Take the current advertising catchphrase
of the »Washington Post«: ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’
Such dramatic words only begin to respond to the fears
surrounding the perpetually uncertain now, as we wonder
whether we are backing onto a cultural precipice. We cannot
speak about recent years without eventually coming around
to certain topics: what is fake or fact, vaudeville politicians,
media blackouts, evidence denial, oppression of journalists.
The news as an entity is in deep crisis, and its viewers are in
a crisis of faith. As so much of what is seen and heard quivers
on the brink of rumour and gossip, current media bodies call
themselves into question; doubts circulate about both the
form and content of news. In this landscape, there is urgency
for artistic investigation into the structures that frame our notions
of truth and traces of it, our cultural and political memory,
and our projections of the future.
León’s works orbit various facets of newsprint media, though
not in isolation. Rather, she explores digitalism through printing
and print processes. The digital screen and its flatness recur
as metaphor, and a minimalistic language is woven across
paper pulp and torn pages. The image as raw data or a summation
of pixels can be seen in León’s treatment of images,
where the newspaper becomes device. Articles are broken up
into words or letters, almost like code. As with »The Tyranny
of Speed or, the Motor Peril and Its Remedy«, the aesthetics
of pace and progress overtake and digest old ways: an automobile
hubcap is stuffed with a crumpled article, and another
hubcap obfuscates the view of a folded-up tabloid format or
a torn sheet.
By implementing various techniques of post-production (editing,
cutting, filtering, pasting, trimming and image correction)
by hand, as opposed to using digital methods, León ensures
that uncertainty pervades. The question continues to circulate:
What is being lost? The artifice of digital language
that León incorporates belies the tangibility of decomposing
waste – the quintessence of a day-old newspaper. Components
of each narrative are fragmented or erased. In the video
work »Printing Press«, broadsheets run through the printer,
our perception tilted at an unusual angle as images and text
streak by in a blur of abstract colour and shape. The television
hangs as if in an airport terminal or waiting room, the meaning
of its content undecipherable. With »Deutsche Tageszeitungen«,
León scratches out every piece of content on several
printed pages with a ballpoint pen and then hangs them, as if
to dry. Silhouettes of letters peer through, but just barely. As
in »Layout«, where León creates her own pulp from recycled
newspapers and bolts them together against the wall, we perceive
flecks of ink. Through rather unlikely means the works
recall Reductivist painting styles and Dadaist narrative-making
through a lyrical nonsense built from miscellaneous words
and image pieces.
There is a subtle femininity to León’s studio processes and their
outcomes. In the studio, she embraces elements of traditionally
female practices that have been contained in the domestic
domain. Images are cut, ordered, collected and archived in a
manner reminiscent of scrapbooking, home décor and craft.
Her works often begin this way, at an intimate scale, before
being incorporated into larger sculptural forms. With »emit ni
tsol lost in time«, León breaks an image apart and weaves it
back together in new compositions on beaded curtains. Now
adorned, each individual curtain can be draped and pulled
into further forms. The negative space of the wall seems to
reference a boundary between the private and public spheres,
as the curtains engage in an almost flirtatious activity of
showing and hiding. A welcome to strangers but a control for
pests, these curtains might blow in the breeze, quiet and passive
editors themselves.
Newspaper is not a material built to last. It burns first and it
burns quickly. It eradicates itself daily. It is a fragile thing with
little archival integrity, and it does not fit easily into the canons
of artwork. Yet, be it stories of war, unrest, discovery or
scandal, everything newsworthy is comprised of small dots of
CMYK on thin grey paper. It is a delicateness rendered invisible
by the power of its content. María León is acutely aware
of this contradiction within her practice, and by bringing it to
light an interesting shift occurs. We understand how fragile
information and content can be. We become aware of our
desire for knowledge and our very human condition of curiosity.
Simultaneously, we encounter a sense of loss. We feel
deep disquiet as our collective memory is erased, the remainder
unsettling yet picturesque.
born 1984, Mérida, Spain // 2007 Bachelor of Fine Arts,
Complutense University of Madrid / 2010 Master of Fine
Arts, Complutense University of Madrid // 2011 »Kaunas
Biennial Textile 11: Rewind-Play-Forward« // 2014 »Back to
the Future«, Embassy of Spain, Berlin // 2015 »XVIII Bienal
Internacional de Arte de Cerveira« // 2016 »14° Mostra Arte
Gas Natural Fenosa«, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo,
A Coruña / 2016 »CALL«, Luis Adelantado Gallery, Valencia /
»Werkstoff«, Cruce Arte y Pensamiento, Madrid / Bilbao Arte
Fundazioa Grant, Bilbao // 2017 »Goldrausch 2017«, Kunstquartier
Bethanien Studio 1, Berlin / »EMBED_IMG«, Tenerife
Espacio de las Artes, Tenerife
María León