In the work of Irene González (Málaga, Spain, 1988), the struggle between memory and loss becomes a generative core. Paper, always a protagonist, assumes a sculptural dimension in her oeuvre: folded, cut, superimposed, turned into a filter or membrane; yielded, entrusted to expert hands.

If recollecting were forgetting is, in its essence, an invitation to pause, to observe with stillness, and to allow ourselves to be inhabited by memory, by absence, and also by longing. Irene González’s work reminds us that art does not always speak aloud: at times it whispers, it speaks through silences, through fragments completed by our own experience.

Each of her strokes is an act of resistance against haste, a way of tending to the delicate, of rescuing something that seemed to have faded away. Her drawings are like stills from an intimate film, where time expands and offers us another way to recollect: recollecting in order to forget, forgetting in order to keep recollecting.

(Text by Patricia Verdial Garay, curator of the exhibition)