MABEL POBLET EXHIBITS ‘WHEN I TALK TO THE OTHER, I CALLED THEM’ AT ODALYS GALLERY

Curatorial text by Alfonso de la Torre

Exercising a true search that, being artistic, refers to a knowledge capable of breaking perceived truths, the works by Mabel Poblet (Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1986) grows as if a slow liberation of those images were taking place. This happens through the development of a careful transition of intertwining processes. Poblet is an artist of an extremely complex work produced through a process of minimal transitions, often series that are embedded in each other to build a personal and extensive album furrowed by common nerves. Her creations are bearers of a beauty that does not exclude a deep slowness, like those who evoke the possibility that creating and wandering, walking or diverging, gift and wandering, are close to each other.

It is well known that her creation comprises a permanent inquiry into different artistic practices —collage and assemblage, photography, light box, sculpture or video art permanent inquiry of different artistic practices— along with performances or site-specific setups, all exercised from a very contemporary radicality. In the past, there was the encounter of different techniques in the same work, up to what we could call immersive site-specific. Combining procedures that will allow her to produce tension that, being compositional, articulated through diverse artistic means, is, before anything else, the product of the exercise of a consciousness that, I dare to write, is always (always, I emphasize) resonant consciousness. A way of thining that flows towards the collective as an inalienable infinite conversation that we could condense in "when I speak to the other, I summon him" by Maurice Blanchot.

Let us consider that we are in front of a work that emerges from a moved self, that invites us to the beauty of the encounter with a mysterious territory, expanded to a limit between the realm of the existing and the unnamable. What we see is important in her work, but also that which is silenced and trembles, that which is left unsaid, that which is absent, the trembling of the complex inexpressible.

But Poblet describes the strangeness and restlessness of the world (while, below, the void), and looks deep, inward, sometimes as if from dreams, wondering in the complexity of her creations about the very act of seeing, about a mysterious spirit wandering in space, and so the corpus of her work is also an experience of thought. Poblet thus creates, from that painful wandering populated by images, with intense emotions, without distraction, rejecting conventional interpretations of the world, presenting her work almost as a serial-like corpus, a sort of complex diary of emotions that seems to have been conceived from a numinous territory of reserve.

Mabel Poblet Pujol (b. Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1986) lives in Habana. She graduated from the Higher Institute of Arts, Havana (ISA, 2012) and the San Alejandro National Academy of Arts (2007). She was part of the Project-Workshop “Conducta” of the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, and is a member of the National Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba (UNEAC).

In 2018, she was awarded for her Exceptional Trajectory by the Embassy of Mexico in Cuba and received the Naomi Award for internship at the Brownstone Foundation (Paris, 2014). In 2017, she was invited to be part of the Cuban Art Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She has participated in the following group exhibitions: Kunst Cuba (Ludwig Forum, 2017, Aachen, Germany), ARTXIOMAS (Art Museum of the Americas, Washington DC, United States, 2016), Complicated Beauty: Contemporary Cuban Art (Tampa Museum, Florida, United States, 2016), 4th Biennial of the End of the World (Mar del Plata, Argentina, 2014), After the Void (Ministry of Nomadads, Edison House, London, 2013), Art de la Grande ile des Caraibes (Le Manoir de Cologny Centro Cultural, Geneva, Switzerland, 2013), 50 in the 50’ (Galería La Acacia, Havana, 2011), Saber disparar, y disparar bien (Galería Villa Manuela, Havana, 2011), Cuban women artists (Centro de Estudios Cubanos , New York, 2010). Mabel Poblet also exhibited individually in Switzerland, Cuba, Peru, Chile, Germany, Greece, the United States and Spain. And her works are included in important public and private collections like: the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Museum of Contemporary Art of Tampa, United States; CIFO Foundation. Cisnero Fontanals, United States; Gilbert Brownstone Foundation, France; Ministry of Nomads, United Kingdom; among others.

MABEL POBLET | CUANDO LE HABLO AL OTRO, LE CONVOCO

Curator: Alfonso de la Torre

Until September 17^th

Galería Odalys | Orfila 5, 28010

Madrid, Spain