Memory is a Current
Galeria Maior
Susana Solano, Eva Lootz, Laia Ventayol, Lara Fluxà, Claudia Pagès Rabal
July - September 2025
Everything refers to something else.
I am made of memories.
I am now more memory than present. – Chantal Maillard
I am made of memories.
I am now more memory than present. – Chantal Maillard
It all begins with a scent.
A scent that travels through time and space, expands, and eventually fades. Smell is the sense most closely tied to memory: it has the power to carry and transport, like a current of air, through images, recollections, and past experiences. In Maillard’s words, “every impression appeals to another, a previous one, which is activated with such strength that the present one becomes a mere support for the memory.”[1] This exhibition, which celebrates thirty-five years of Galeria Maior by bringing together artists from different generations, begins with the idea of memory as a living current. Not a fixed structure or archive, but a dynamic flow that moves through bodies and materials.
In Claudia Pagès Rabal’s installation, Ventiladores, petxines (Costa Daurada), four fans act as ephemeral landscapes dispersing synthetic fragrances. At their center, shells are trapped in welded shapes inspired by the geometries of nonlinear temporalities: common tangent, centripetal force, spiral, concentric circle. The shells come from beaches on the Costa Daurada, which today retain only imported sand. Here, memory is fragile, constructed. How do we think about landscapes that are vanishing? Sand is a friend of entropy, like the fleeting gesture of tracing a spiral in it with a finger.
This centripetal force is echoed in Susana Solano’s work: a large black swirl in acrylic on paper draws us toward its center, as if we might slip inside and disappear. Tornado or portal, it is not a static image but an inner motion, a force inviting us to cross into another dimension. These works from the 1990s propose a visual language between chaos and order, between the vortex and small, isolated, vibrant units — like tiny windows through which to see.
The circle reappears, this time as a metallic container filled with pigment in the work of Laia Ventayol. In her site-specific installation, paper sheets gradually collect traces and imprints. It is an open laboratory that explores what happens when we intervene in a material as fragile, malleable, and sensitive as paper. But it also invites us to think of memory itself as a material, since the artist re-creates this installation from memories of an early experience in her studio in Germany more than ten years ago. Laia does not seek the image, but the trace — as a small force that brings about change, even if the mark is not meant to be permanent. Some of them will disappear and fade with the passing of time…
This process of fading connects us with language in the work of Eva Lootz, who in recent years has investigated how entire worldviews disappear along with the loss of languages. Her drawings function like a diary — brief records of multidirectional thought. Fragments of a discontinuous and vibrant archive: aquatic forms, botanical shapes, signs, and language. In one of the drawings, an organic form opens like a flower beneath the words Zeit-form. Time and form are two interwoven dimensions, each shaping the other. Alongside this paper series, Injerto II, a piece first exhibited in the gallery in the 1990s, is also presented: a stool from which a bronze branch sprouts, seemingly still growing, as if it had never stopped.
Finally, the works of Lara Fluxà bring the journey to a close. Glass, born of fire and breath, takes on suspended forms containing air, water, electricity. Breath has become matter, shaping vibrant membranes. Inspired by the aesthetics of power plants, her recent sculptures also dialogue with the organic: creatures containing their own energy, like fireflies rising. Glass, always on the verge of breaking, becomes a sensitive body, linking technical gesture with intuition and care.
The air that transports us, the water that stains, the vortex of language, the electricity that connects us. Currents that run through everything: materials, bodies, practices that shape our being and thought. This exhibition proposes a constellation of works connected by those invisible currents, reminding us that memory is not a place to return to, but a pulse that unfolds in the present. In the encounter between generations, it presents the gallery’s journey not as a closed retrospective, but as a network generating new nodes. Because what endures is not what remains intact, but what continues to generate connections, questions, and new ways of being together.
[1] Maillard, Chantal. Bélgica. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2011, pp. 97–98. Translation by the author.