In front of Núria Fuster’s studio in Berlin, a huge mountain of rubble hides an old and enormous STASI building. There are metals, wood, cement and dirt that still survive as a historical space now blurred like a great cloud of suspended dust. The demolition process involved different steps that the artist walked through visually from her window. Each time that pieces of iron accumulated in that mountain of rubble, she also felt its emotionality, as if she could feel the weight of the material or understand its internal language. As if that Muntanya (2024), a remnant of a pipe attached to the structure of a chair, was carried on her back.
As a result of this listening, the works gathered in Caminar montañas mientras respiro esculturas emerge. Canto I and Canto II (2024) respond musically from the title. They rotate and make noise between vision and hearing. At times, the skin seems to be the best listener, as it bristles and quivers at a sound or a silence. Suspension I and Suspension II (2024) are glazed ceramics hanging from steel cables from the ceiling. They release meanings like valves release steam, and respond to Núria Fuster’s idea of sculpture as an elastic concept and a fluid state. That is: to experience raw ceramics, the sudden spell of a mobile act brought to stillness. Then, the double life of color, unfired and fired. The glaze, the oxides. The transformations in the kiln during firing by visualizing the physical changes: the elimination of chemical water, the clay moving towards its stoneware form. The changing atmosphere of the kiln during cooling. The faint glow at the final temperature drop. And, even though the shapes of the ceramics change, even though each moment dies into the next, even though nothing is done to make it last, something is happening. Each moment propels life forward.
This idea resonates especially in the work entitled Dol (2024). In Catalan it means pain and mourning, a binomial surely inseparable. Here, too, the bangs embrace an iron, and the other way around. Surrounding it, a kind of shell is formed, revealing a quiet inner unity. The sculpture’s bodily rhythm becomes feeling, and emotions are transformed into physical signs. In a Abrazo Térmico (Thermal Embrace) (2024), another work reads. The life that seeks life, the sun. The cold that seeks warmth. The instinct that seeks a transformation. Balance in a field of unequal tensions.
Núria Fuster’s sculptures cross the space and the space crosses them. They dialogue with each other through a relational act. They appear as strange entities, generating encounters and spaces from which to look again. They are works that have mysterious vital forces that adopt diverse forms, developing from one another, and each one independent from the previous one in order to function in its own space. There is a kind of condensation. Something like an agitation. They look like incarnations that evolve when there is a change of energy. It may seem like an abstract thought, but it is not really if we think of something as common as separations: they heal and transform continuously. Or in death, which moves through the body as an invisible presence. We cannot survive without it. It is the same in ceramics: they carry the future inside. The matter is always “feeling” the pressures on it, whether we are aware of it or not. And something similar could be said of poetry: it lives frankly in a world of mutants and there is a comfort in it and a transformation in which we participate. But it requires a pure ear. This is what Tsvietáieva claims from the writing, always present on the artist’s work table, where the important thing is neither the poem nor the theme, but the intonation and that this is only achieved through saturation and linguistic expansion and the rupture of the syntactic rules of prose, capable of bringing the echo of emotions.
Núria Fuster’s works also propose an attentive listening. She says: “the irons are like syllables that are articulated in a related process forming new words, a new language, her own, that the artist learns and intuits, and babbles”. The internal laws of the sculptures are perceived as unique centers that evolve in a continuous relationship with each other, like a marriage of forces. There is something cosmic there, in this way of relating the world. The artist is able to listen to the inner questions, the unspoken ones, the hopes, the misgivings, the dreams. To dream, like David Medalla, of the day when the sculptures breathe, smile, dance or walk. That they vibrate or wobble. Sculptures that preserve the secret dimensions of a shadow or that push into the realm of the imagination. That ability to contemplate living images that are not perceptible to the senses. In that imaginative life, his works that function as a pulse. It is not produced by force, but by coordination. That is: the opening of the form. Tear this down to be able to put this other. Remove something, to add something else, to break something. Everything is sculpture bubbling and bubbling with possibilities. The world in expansion. The continuous game.
Text by Bea Espejo, 2024.
Caminar montañas mientras respiro escultura
April 6 – May 25, 2024
Núria Fuster
Galería Juan Silió
C/ Dr. Fourquet, 20, 28012. Madrid.
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday,
11am – 7pm.
Saturday,
11am – 2pm.