Marcela Gómez, Installation “Apesanteurs”

After her explorations of nature, which brought to the fore rots and branches (Maison de l'Amérique latine, "Transferts", 1995); after her interrogation of space through the tension of geometry's lines ("Ingravideces", Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Denys Puech Museum, Rodez, 2005); after her move towards evanescence and the essence of things, through a combination of opposites between empty and filled space ("Vanité…", videos and neons Agora Tête d'Or, Lyon 2008), French-Argentinean artist Marcela Gómez (Rosario, 1963) continues to move forward with a de-materialization of forms, connected to concerns that are aesthetic and existential at the same time, and setting in motion what we could call a "sensible and relational minimalism". Although the sensations provoked by this installation at the Maison de l'Amérique latine can be compared to the "Penetrables" created by the kinetic artist Jesús Soto, weightlessness remains the key word in Gómez's work, becoming the existential trigger, the soul of her inward-looking discourse, dominated by a sober, lightweight, transparent aesthetic that this time around vibrates under light. Marcela Gómez seems to shed everything superfluous in order to retain only what is essential; however, this doesn't make her work austere, since pleasure is always present both for her and for the participant viewer. At the Maison de l'Amérique latine, the artist suggest or invites us to experience her light-based installation as the "intimate choreography of an wandering traveler". Although invisible, the drawing is located at the center of the space, as Gómez's seeks to create a "corporeality" of empty space with the light's vibrations. The electro-luminescent thread cuts through space like a flame, just as other materials did in her previous work, such as iron and rubber ("Projections n° 3", 2004), which proposed a physical incursion in the immaterial. The artistic and sensorial experience carried forward for many years now by Marcela Gómez provokes a deep reflection. Her interrogation—articulated around a maxim by David Georges Emmerich (1925-1966): "instead of thinking in terms of materials, to ultimately think in terms of structure"—is inspired on the investigations carried out by this architect and engineer, for whom "space, like matter, organizes itself, motu proprio, according to its own morpho-genetic laws, moved by its own virtualities and its own tropisms". These are the challenges confronted by the artist on the basis of diverse materials: to find a life for space; to design and build emptiness in order to give it life and existence; and, finally, to make transparency the virtual materiality of her sensible relationship with the world.