Belén Rodríguez  “Sal Metálica”.

From February 11, 2023 to June 4, 2023.

Place: La Capilla del Museo Patio Herreriano, en Valladolid.

“Sal Metálica” is the title of the exhibition that Belén Rodríguez has conceived in response to the proposal of the Patio Herreriano Museum to activate the Chapel and Room 9 of the museum, a work, therefore, specific in which the artist takes a step more in his research on color as a constitutive element of painting and on the limits of painting itself. The museum space, especially that of the Chapel, is understood here as an extension of the pictorial, a place in which the enormous challenge of scale is approached from the precise assumption of proportion and the narrative character that define. Belén Rodríguez conceives the place as a territory, a landscape that we walk through, dressed in the outfits that she herself has designed. The surface of the canvas evokes a stone, marble material, and the whole confirms the scenographic character that many of his previous works already pointed out, although now he emphasizes the “inhabitable” nature of the work, the induction to experience in which the painting, rather than looking at oneself, one lives and where the place is transformed, ductile and dynamic, always different after our passage.

The metallic salt to which the title of the exhibition refers is the element that makes it possible for color to be constituted as such. It is the driver of the pigment towards a state that allows it to be perceptible to the human eye. We could say, perhaps from a somewhat lax approach, that it turns the ethereal condition of light into potential chromatic matter. The works that we see in room 9 are composed of fabrics that have an ambivalent relationship with their supports, and, in their different dialogues, or in the various ways in which fabric and support are related, transit is formalized. Belén Rodríguez does not hide the sources and stimuli that fuel her interest, namely a red cabbage heart, autumn in the forests of Cantabria, the skin of an avocado, the cold texture of marble… Based on a meticulous conceptual process, the perception of the different tonalities takes shape. On the one hand, it echoes the internal rhythms of nature, and on the other, it confirms that color becomes visible only from subjective impressions that can hardly be ascribed to normative standards. In any case, his exhaustive analysis has an unappealable conclusion: color enjoys a vigorous and inalienable autonomy.

Javier Hontoria