When observing the components of Mercedes Elena González’s recent work, grouped together here under the title “Dilatantes”, we could assume that they form an integral part of an “archive” or “register” of successive previous works. With this temporal recuperation, González establishes a formal and conceptual continuity that is a function of the traces drawn throughout her repertoire, and that is renovated through new inquiries that draw on the collection of scraps of her previous work. This reading also allows us to make visible overlapping specificities in her current body of work. It is formalist, because of the recurring geometric patterns that give planar structure, and it is conceptual for its indisputable critical capacity, expressed in virtue of the political subject, or what has been called “affective feminism”.

The works in the exhibition are organized according to their processes of creation: Dilatantes Tapestries, Dilatantes Blues and Dilatagramas, names that include techniques reiterated from a personal and intimate deontology. They also share an element taken from decades-old drawings: the Vulvosas, the everlasting retracted vertical smile. In its appearance, the grouping uses geometry and color in the same way as an ion, attracting a hidden discourse that is both distant from the purposes of Modernism’s disciplines, and, even more, that subverts them. In this exhibition, the artist symbolically resolves the controversial synthesis of geometry and representation, and she does it with sharpness and intuition: investigating through her creative processes, lifting layers of light and shadow in this restless “archive” that awaits in her studio.

Tahia Rivero