Interiors of the physical spectrum: Valentina Attolini
At Property Journal we are pleased to share this review written by M.S. Yaniz, which analyzes the work of emerging artist Valentina Attolini. With a unique approach that challenges the boundaries of visual art and the sensorial, Attolini has consolidated a proposal that fuses the pictorial, the sculptural and the performative. Her work, which addresses unconventional materials and indescribable sensations, represents a fresh and solid voice within Mexican contemporary art..
Paradox: at the limits of the end of representation
the exaltation of the visual becomes
a residue of the visual and suggests sensorial incursion.
- Helio Oiticica
It was the year 2018. In the center of Tlalpan there was a collective exhibition at TACO (Contemporary Art Workshops). Among the diversity of works in a student show there were some paintings that caught my attention. They were paintings in terms of a discourse on surfaces, depth of field, colours, superposition and their arrangement in space. But they did not have any typically pictorial material. Instead of pigments, the works consisted of a series of tights stretched over the frame. The canvas barely existed in the transparencies of the nylon. I imagine that because of the untypical materials she calls these works sculptures, but it is a pictorial thought. She does not ask so much about creating encircling bodies as about the gaze on a surface, and the tights, being arranged in the public space of the gallery, strain the assumptions about intimacy and the interior of a visible body.
Those paintings stayed in my memory for years. It was only recently that I learned that they were pieces by Valentina Attolini (1998), who from those first plastic intuitions has developed a solid body of work. The next time I saw Attolini's work was in December 2023, in her solo show “Es un lugar que no existe” (It's a place that doesn't exist), curated by Ana Sofía Esteva. This exhibition was part of a cycle of solo exhibitions managed by Sofía Táboas, who invited emerging artists to develop different projects presented in the Red de Arte Mexicana (RAM) space.
That afternoon, a few meters from the gallery, a very strong stench of seafood could be perceived. The smell intensified as you moved forward. There were many people standing in a circle around a table where Valentina Attolini, very elegant with long gloves, was opening oysters and people from the public came to taste them in a sort of ritual of sensory exchange. The artist placed the oyster juice on a grill, which evaporated it and intensified the smells. It was an olfactory sculpture or a painting whose density was only perceptible with the sense of smell.
In addition to this performance, the residue of which was a piece of smell, the show consisted of a series of large-format paintings. This time they were paintings; linen canvas, stretchers, pigments on a surface and a series of comments on the boundaries of figuration and abstraction. On the possibilities of representation without literality. These paintings, suggested by smell, appeared as landscapes of the interior of the skin, of the viscous textures of living and dead beings. The eroticism of a corporality borders on the disgusting depending on the scale. These paintings presented a debate on libido and the possibility of its enunciation in a pictorial body.
There are many ways to paint a picture. There are those who have a program, those who sketch, those who diagram with AI and those who project and paint on the light. But Valentina Attolini imagines images and launches herself into the pure white of the canvas. She lets herself be carried away by the bodily sensation of a first intuition. Perhaps the series that best fits this attitude is “Sónambulos, los ojos lloran” (Sleepwalkers, eyelids cry), which she made at the SOLOS Residence and exhibited at Espacio Unión. In this series, Attolini made twenty monotypes of her dreams. Accompanied by a wild writing of diaries and logs, the artist landed interior landscapes in images. Of mountains that exploded with eyes, feathers and horizons. This series shows the courage with which Valentina gives herself to the pictorial. As a surrealist who practices automatic writing, it seems that she invented a kind of automatic painting or somnambulistic painting in which the dream psyche, careless and imaginative, lets itself go freely to the stream of consciousness. As in dreams, in Attolini's monotypes one can perceive a certain referentiality to things in the world, but pure abstraction without a referent is also present. The pure immanence of sensorial forces that explode on one side of the surface and on the other. Again, what is seen can be a desire, an obsession, a fear, a memory or, merely, a pictorial phenomenon.
In addition to painting, Attolini likes football and Mickey Mouse. Despite knowing the discursive capital of these two things in the art world, she says that she would never become a Pikachu artist or a Cyber-pop painter. Her work is always an inquiry into the internal experiences of the physical spectrum, it is a materialist operating room far outside of the cultural. What she sought from the beginning is how one can approach indescribable sensations, how to feel that which does not pass through the regime of visuality and yet exists.
About the critic
M.S. Yaniz
He is a critic and speculative curator. He is a graduate student in Art History (UNAM). He specializes in the intersections of material poetics and their relationship with politics and the future. He has curated exhibitions in galleries and independent spaces. He writes for magazines such as Onda, , tripleAmpersand Journal (&&&), , Gas Tv, Amigas íntimos or Tierra Adentro. He translated Mark Fisher's unpublished book, Comunismo ácido, published by Herring Publisher in 2021.
