Em Bruto: Relações Comoventes [In the Raw: Emotional Relationships] occupies the big exhibition room at Cerezales Antonino and Cinia Foundation (FCAYC), in Cerezales del Condado, a city a few kilometres from León, in the northwest of Spain.
For the most part produced especially for the exhibition space at the FCAYC, a private Spanish foundation (their new art centre opened in 2017), Em Bruto: Relações Comoventes presents one big installation titled, Estaleiro [Construction Site], composed by beams, trestles, ladders, and sentences that guide the visitor through the “work space”; a version of her well known Materials Lab; and some new pieces, like Matéria Consciente [Conscious Matter] (2022), composed by talcum stones and cut books (important studies on gender: Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture by Rosemarie Buikema and Iris van der Tuin, and Touching Feeling by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), or the work Building Block (Carla Lonzi), also from 2022, that references Italian art critic Carla Lonzi, founder of the group Rivolta Femminile, and composed by her book Self-Portrait, and by Verde Viana marble.
In this construction site made of structures in Nordic pine, Fragateiro continues her path, working with definitions of architecture, installation and sculpture. At the same time, the artist hides and exposes openly the clues to her (our) contemporary world, and possible connections, activations and activisms that make the density of the archive of our days. As an example, references are made to Nina Simone, Angela Davis, Eileen Gray, Lina Bo Bardi, or the architecture magazine Casabella. The mind of this Estaleiro is fertile and in constant mutation, the visitor has the freedom to choose their path in between the clues that are presented. It is all out in the open.
In the words of the curator, Alfredo Puente: “The first time I saw the open boxes of Materials Lab, the archipelago of images, headlines, and materials exposed to light by Fernanda Fragateiro as poetics of her field of research, I had an intense ‘sensation of landscape’ – a visual narrative in the context of a somewhat geographical (and biographical) information system”. Em Bruto: Relações Comoventes by Fernanda Fragateiro is on show till December 4th 2022, at Cerezales Antonino and Cinia Foundation.
