LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY IN LÚA CODERCH'S WORK AT THE RYDER
The work that Lúa Coderch (Iquitos, Peru, 1982) has been doing around language takes over her recent solo show at Madrid's The Ryder Projects to consolidate a new relational vision of communicative practices. Exhausted and exuberant, title of this partially retrospective and almost thesis exhibition, also responds to the two apparently opposite moods, but with an inexorable link, of the vital needs that seep into contemporary society between individuals and a certain extimacy that, organically, seems to have been imposed.
Lúa Coderch analyzes the process by which incapacities, self-difficulties and incomprehension and pressure from an increasingly suffocating environment develop. However, this exhaustion progresses from the social imperative and is resized in its maximum impact building from the need for an everlasting exuberant and divine presence. Her works delve into this process from the narrative, considering her initial approach as a metalanguage in which technique and result revolve around communication.
This narrative and literary construction, of which the artist can boast a certain experience, is the thread that vertebrates the exhibition, a world created from several creative languages and that reverberates between artificial intelligence, photography, installation or video to consolidate her conceptual proposal. From the difficulty of expression comes Echo (The coach one) (2022), a piece born from the myth of the oréade punished to repeat the last word emitted by her interlocutor and that illustrates and portrays the inability to weave a conversation. The basic artificial intelligence that manages to reproduce the repetition of the dialogue and its disconnection with the one that the device emits makes this work a metaphor with different angles, from the dehumanization itself certainly humanized of the processes of automatic learning to the exclusively unidirectional interaction, creating the necessary rhetoric to delve into the idea of communicative difficulty.
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Lúa Coderch. Not I (2018). One-channel, digital video, color, sound. 20 min. Ed 3+ 1 AP. Courtesy of The Ryder Projects
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Lúa Coderch. Echo (The Couch One), 2022. Upholstered structure, artificial hair, Raspberry Pi, speaker and microphone. 120 x 277 x 60 cm. Unique. Courtesy of The Ryder Projects
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Lúa Coderch. Sore throat 10% darker (I know it hurts now), 2018. Digital print, tinted glass. 40 x 30 cm. Edition of 3. Courtesy of The Ryder Projects
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Lúa Coderch. Sore throat 10% darker (I need), 2018. Digital print, tinted glass. 70 x 50 cm. Edition of 3. Courtesy of The Ryder Projects
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Lúa Coderch. Sore throat 10% darker (I love you), 2018. Digital print, tinted glass. 40 x 30 cm. Edition of 3. Courtesy of The Ryder Projects
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Lúa Coderch. Sore throat 10% darker (I really like you), 2018. Digital print, tinted glass. 40 x 30 cm. Edition of 3. Courtesy of The Ryder Projects
Coderch also alludes to the feeling through language, and pushes it to portray itself in situations of complicated resolution such as the end of relationships. The series of digital prints Sure throat 10% darker (2018) show a conceptual total that is built by the image of medicinal plants associated with the analgesia of the throat along with hackneyed phrases of the moments of sentimental rupture and that, complemented with the audio of We can still be friends (2018), cools the dialectic of feelings and the simple resource of the topic before the difficulty of a more intense expression.
From there, that bidirectional relational theme could be linked to a broader one in Not I (2018) which, together with Seesaw-Bench (2022), forms a video installation that picks up the witness of the linguistic thought process and the expressive variables of it, delving into a semiotic part, but also for the environment that produces them, as well as of negotiation. This last concept is the basis of the series, Cold Reading (2016), which alludes to the aseptic of easy, closed, packaged language with which to unwind socially so as not to encounter difficulty.
The two most recent of the works on display are fundamental to the understanding of the whole. S/T (The Girl With No Door On Her Mouth) (2025) is directly linked to the title of the show, and alludes, with two steel tubes painted pink, to that cold, visual and rigid contrast that it shares with the concept of discretion, presence, prudence and impediment. For its part, Reaction (Smile with tear, 1KB) (2025) takes us to a scenario of involuntary learning for the artist in the construction of an installation of 1024 gold-plated and hand-painted thumbtacks that uses the emoticon as a universal language and that supposes a highly conceptual discovery: the existence of the same number to perform certain geometry and the weight of an archive of a micro-story, thus closing a quadrature that allows framing the different angles of language.
Exhausted and exuberant can be seen until March 15 at The RYDER Projects, Miguel Servet, 13, Madrid (Spain).
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