Patricia Esquivias

MAISTERRAVALBUENA is pleased to present for its opening show “Reads Like The Paper” by the artist Patricia Esquivias.

Patricia Esquivias narrates situations based on a stretchable reality. Without an immediate audience she can talk following loose scripts that she pairs with bare images. In the series "Reads Like The Paper" the artist is the narrator, speaking in English with Spanish accent. Her intonation is slow and somehow incorrect, rather childlike. Unexpectedly, complicated stories dealing with quotidian issues unravel in a few sentences. They sound personal, as if one voice had taken the responsibility of being affected by everything in the world. These absurd stories can sound true, perhaps because even if they are largely made up, they are grounded in genuine concerns. What you see isn’t properly aligned to what you hear producing a slippage. Humour and drama, and the possible and the unlikely, inform the work to generate doubt and thought. The artist focuses on the amorphous because of its capacity to open the possibilities of the imagination. Unclassifiable situations tend to be standardized, but she wants to present them, unclassifiable and maybe uncomfortable, in order to open their potential.

Patricia Esquivias’ visuals are matter-of-fact in response to contemporary media’s spectacular artifice. You can often see her hands in the frame creating the image, and there are no digital effects. When the visuals are combined with the story something goes awry, in this seams-full composition a desired space is generated. It is a space of mystery and romance, in which the artist urges the viewer first to believe and then to question.

Apart from this video series there will be shown a projection of slides, a wall drawing, and series of posters within the same concept as the videoinstallation.

Patricia Esquivias