Tirar del hilo
Baró Galeria
Amparo de la Sota, Elisa Pardo Puch, Eugenio Espinoza, Mano Penalva & Néstor García.
March - May 2025
As a metaphor, pulling the thread means initiating a process that leads to the discovery of something not yet known, a hidden truth. It implies surrendering to contingency: a path that unfolds as one moves forward, without a predetermined form. Is it possible to hold an intuition between one’s fingers? Here, knowledge becomes a tactile reality and curiosity a continuous line whose end gradually dissolves.
Yet pulling the thread is also a minimal gesture with a certain destructive potential — in the best possible sense. It can undo a weave, deconstruct a structure, or destabilize a grid. These two dimensions — the metaphor and the gesture — converge in this group exhibition bringing together the work of Eugenio Espinoza, Mano Penalva, Néstor García, Elisa Pardo Puch, and Amparo de la Sota. To think about textile practice from a contemporary perspective is to attend to persistence, allowing a practice to reveal its folds, knots, and possibilities.
Eugenio Espinoza approaches the grid as a structural thread within modern thought. By displacing it, fragmenting it, or extending it into space, his work exposes the limits of the systems that organize vision and space through European Cartesian rationality. The works presented here were produced in transit, during journeys and displacements: from a recent painting to a series of works on paper that function as an archive of his thinking. They include photographs of processes, tactile actions, and participatory experiences that highlight the political and relational dimension of his practice.
Mano Penalva reflects on everyday experience and collective memory. Through the assemblage of textiles, objects, and found fragments, his works establish fragile relationships with the materials that surround us, recombining and reassembling them in different ways. The gesture of joining becomes here a form of material thinking, where the affective and the structural intertwine.
In the practice of Néstor García, textile functions as a surface for dialogue with painting, landscape, and the past. His recent works appear as beautiful paintings on hammocks, yet pulling the thread here reveals a latent colonial history. The tropical landscapes refer to the travelling painter Ferdinand Bellermann, who in the first half of the nineteenth century followed Humboldt’s route through Latin America, moving across Venezuela, particularly places such as the Cueva del Guácharo and the Amazon region. The painterly gesture intersects with the textile surface to reveal the ideological layers embedded in the representation of landscape.
As in traditional hammocks, Elisa Pardo Puch develops a research practice that recovers an artisanal technique: almazuela, which consists of sewing together leftover fabric scraps to form geometric patterns and structures from fragments. Repetition and material accumulation generate surfaces and structures that seem to hold themselves together through sheer persistence. When can a structure collapse through repetition?
Finally, the delicate textile work of Amparo de la Sota integrates systems of representation connected to memory, language, and political inheritance. Her works reveal time as material and make the process visible as an essential part of form. The slowness inherent in textile work translates into stitches that generate unstable and imperfect maps, celebrating the density of slow time while questioning accelerated models of productivity.
The exhibition invites us to inhabit this collective weave with an awareness of its fragility, knowing that any structure may at some point begin to unravel. Thinking means attending to what comes undone. Textile unfolds here as research, support, and inquiry; as the recovery of artisanal techniques, the questioning of ideological systems, and a relational practice that engages the body. The thread appears here as a metaphor for thought, but also as a certain way of doing: joining, tensioning, insisting.