Sentimientos Viscosos

An installation composed of seventeen wax panels traces the perimeter of the terrace. The seduction of the material invites the viewer to come closer. Once inside, the visitor encounters a series of contrasts: the veiled and the revealed, desire and repulsion, immensity and intimacy.

The continuous mural creates an enveloping space that displaces the need to understand everything immediately. The artist proposes an experience that privileges the sensory over the rational: here, the experience begins in the body—before understanding, one feels. The delicate appearance of the wax—and its strong tactile presence—contrasts with the resistance required for its installation in the open air. The wall ceases to delimit and instead gives continuity to immensity. As Gaston Bachelard suggests in The Poetics of Space, immensity can also be experienced in an intimate way, activating imagination and affective memory.

Wax, a material associated with preservation, functions here as a skin or a veil that both conceals and suggests. Small gestures become visible, objects that hide their essence and, within that mystery, amplify their potential to be. They can be anything we imagine; they can be treasures or scars, marks on the skin that remain to remind us of its fragility.

The damp fabrics, whose plasticity evokes the “wet drapery” of classical sculpture, suggest the presence of the living, moist body, which is unveiled through the viewer’s gaze. What is it that we are looking at? Who is looking? The work also establishes a play of gazes: the viewer seems to dominate, but is soon absorbed by the piece, becoming lost within it and gradually discovering what reveals itself.

Between concealment and appearance, attraction and rejection, the work activates a sensitive response in those who move through it. Within this play of tensions, Arellano explores the limits between seeing and being seen, questioning the position of the viewer and destabilizing their gaze, to unfold an experience where the poetic, the bodily, and the emotional converge.

Andrea Bustillos Duhart
Curator