Luciana Lamothe “Folding Roads” at Galleria Alberta Pane, Venice

“Folding Roads” by Luciana Lamothe, curated by Ilaria Gianni, at Alberta Pane Gallery, Venice, from 16 April 2024 to 27 July 2024.

Relations and dynamic tensions between body and matter define Folding Roads, a solo exhibition of Argentinian artist Luciana Lamothe (1975), hosted at the Venetian venue of the Alberta Pane Gallery from 16 April (opening by invitation only on Friday, 19 April) until 27 July.
The show is accompanied by a critical text by curator Ilaria Gianni.
Appointed to represent her country at the 60th Venice Biennale, Lamothe proves her versatility with a retrospective exhibition that, in dialogue with the important installation project set up in the spaces of the Arsenale, allows visitors to delve into an artistic universe made of sinuous and orthogonal forms, organic and at the same time architectural shapes.
Folding Roads unfolds in the spaces of the Venetian gallery, bringing into dialogue four main bodies of works: sculptures, works on paper, photographs and videos created over the last decade.
Through different media, the exhibition invites us to explore Luciana Lamothe’s practice, focusing in particular on the constant tensive, empathic, sensitive and physical relationship between body and matter that has been a constant feature of her work for many years.

The sculptures on display, made of solid and structural materials and made flexible and mobile, are indeed activated by the action and perception of the viewer: in an osmotic exchange, without a solution of continuity or hierarchy, the viewer finds himself involved in a vital and destabilising relationship with the work, between material and spatial tensions.
On the other hand, the sculptures of the Adentro series stand out for their more intimate dimension; these are handles that, having lost their function, make the energetic force of destruction the starting point for a process of transformation.
Visually and conceptually echoing the sculptural works, the exhibited drawings are characterized by geometric and curvilinear shapes that coexist between order and chaos; work tools and pencil outlined hands draw ambiguous forms that are combined in an infinity of solutions.
Delicacy and fragility thus cohabit with geometric, solid and defined elements in a series of ever-changing tensions, behind which action is implied.
Body, hands and action are also recurring elements in the photographs on display, which highlight a performative, sometimes even vandalistic and subversive aspect of Luciana Lamothe’s practice.
In the Perspectiva series the artist’s hands, leading actors, capture the silhouette of an unaware passer-by, who becomes an accomplice to an action and a projection of an idea.
In the most recent series of self-portraits, Retrato Borde (2022), an ephemeral and transient reflection in an urban puddle sees the artist’s body superimposed, Narcissus-like, with water and urban waste.
In a continuum of relationships and correspondences, between plant elements, materials and human interventions, remains and detritus are also central in the exhibited video Caja Tarra Silla Marco from 2011, filmed in a rural landscape, in which the artist moves, camera in hand, between waste, nature and industrial architecture.

In Folding Roads, Luciana Lamothe’s transversal ability to deal with different media and materials thus emerges strongly.
In particular, the concept of trans-materiality through which the artist rethinks the condition of the materials, conceiving them as sensitive and tense entities, is highlighted.
Moreover, the vital communion between body and matter remains the essence of an important research into the potential and sensitivity of materials, presented here in the form of installations, sculptures, drawings and videos created over the last decade.