Relations and dynamic tensions between body and matter define Folding Roads, a solo exhibition of Argentinian artist Luciana Lamothe (1975), hosted at the Venetian venue of the Alberta Pane Gallery. The show is accompanied by a critical text by curator Ilaria Gianni.

Appointed to represent her country at the 60th Venice Biennale, Lamothe proves her versatility with a retrospective exhibition that, in dialogue with the important installation project set up in the spaces of the Arsenale, allows visitors to delve into an artistic universe made of sinuous and orthogonal forms, organic, and at the same time architectural shapes.

Folding Roads unfolds in the spaces of the Venetian gallery, bringing into dialogue four main bodies of works: sculptures, works on paper, photographs and videos created over the last decade. Through different media, the exhibition invites us to explore Luciana Lamothe's practice, focusing in particular on the constant tensive, empathic, sensitive, and physical relationship between body and matter that has been a constant feature of her work for many years.

The sculptures on display, made of solid and structural materials and made flexible and mobile, are indeed activated by the action and perception of the viewer: in an osmotic exchange, without a solution of continuity or hierarchy, the viewer finds himself involved in a vital and destabilising relationship with the work, between material and spatial tensions.

On the other hand, the sculptures of the Adentro series stand out for their more intimate dimension; these are handles that, having lost their function, make the energetic force of destruction the starting point for a process of transformation.

Visually and conceptually echoing the sculptural works, the exhibited drawings are characterized by geometric and curvilinear shapes that coexist between order and chaos; work tools and pencil outlined hands draw ambiguous forms that are combined in an infinity of solutions. Delicacy and fragility thus cohabit with geometric, solid and defined elements in a series of ever-changing tensions, behind which action is implied.

Body, hands, and action are also recurring elements in the photographs on display, which highlight a performative, sometimes even vandalistic and subversive aspect of Luciana Lamothe's practice.

In the Encd and Perspectiva series, the artist's hands, leading actors, capture the silhouette of an unaware passer-by, who becomes an accomplice to an action and a projection of an idea. In the most recent series of self-portraits, Retrato Borde (2022), an ephemeral and transient reflection in an urban puddle sees the artist's body superimposed, Narcissus-like, with water and urban waste.

In a continuum of relationships and correspondences, between plant elements, materials and human interventions, remains and detritus are also central in the exhibited video Caja Tarra Silla Marco from 2011, filmed in a rural landscape, in which the artist moves, camera in hand, between waste, nature, and industrial architecture. However, it is in the fleeting intertwining of fingers that appears in the almost imperceptible One Frame Life (2022) that, as Lamothe is wont to do with other materials, the artistic medium is brought to its full potential through its minimal possibilities; a work that, by annulling movement and inhibiting the vision of the image reflects on the fragility of materials and the passing of time.

In Folding Roads, Luciana Lamothe's transversal ability to deal with different media and materials thus emerges strongly. In particular, the concept of trans-materiality through which the artist rethinks the condition of the materials, conceiving them as sensitive and tense entities is highlighted.

Moreover, the vital communion between body and matter remains the essence of an important research into the potential and sensitivity of materials, presented here in the form of installations, sculptures, drawings, and videos created over the last decade.

Luciana Lamothe works with sculpture, drawing, photography, video and, especially, installation. The public is invited and equally challenged to walk through, traverse, and relate to Lamothe's installations, which often provoke feelings of instability and vertigo, as a metaphor for the fragility of socially established structures. In her works, a brutalist and minimalist aesthetic coexists with delicate and sinuous forms, created from solid and structural materials pushed to the extremes of their potential.

Lamothe is the artist selected to represent Argentina at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2024). Her artworks have also been exhibited at the 11th Lyon Biennale, at the 5th Berlin Biennale and at the 3rd Montevideo Biennale.

Her work has been shown internationally in institutions and events such as Art Basel Miami Beach Meridians; Art Basel Cities, Buenos Aires; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/ Bethanien, Berlin; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela; La Maison Rouge-Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Da Maré Museum, Rio de Janeiro; Museo del Barrio, New York; MAMBA, Buenos Aires; Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires; MNBA, Buenos Aires.

Luciana Lamothe has also been Artist-in-Residence at MANA Wynwood, Florida; Art Dubai, Dubai; Air Antwerp, Antwerp; Skowhegan, Maine. In 2021, she also participated in the Artistin-Residence program at Atelier NI in Marseille. The artist was awarded the 1st Prize of the Lichter Art Award, Frankfurt; the 1st Prize of the Itaú Cultural Award, Buenos Aires and in 2011 was a recipient of the fellowship of the Artists Program of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, in Buenos Aires. Lamothe also received the Pollock-Krasner Grant for Artists from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York in 2019.

Her work is part of important private and public collections such as Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC), Santiago de Compostela; Fundación Itaú Cultural, Buenos Aires; Museo Arte Contemporáneo de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (MAR), Buenos Aires; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario (Castagnino+MACRO), Santa Fe; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA), Buenos Aires; Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Texas; 21C Museum Hotels, Kentucky