BARCELONA.- Violeta Mayoral (Almeria, 1988) grew up in the Tabernas desert, a harsh environment that has influenced her gaze. In the selection of photographs presented at the Fundació Joan Miró, the artist situates human experience in the open air, with no ceiling or shelter, in empty, unattainable landscapes which accentuate vulnerability.

Most of the images in the show are of cold temperatures, taken at dusk or at times of low luminosity. They represent sites that, at first view, could seem hostile. In them, time has been suspended and the given space gives rise to a sense of estrangement, lacking all points of reference. The few features that can be seen seek to mark out and give sense to the infinite quality of a diluting landscape without contours: a sea that is a wall, a vegetation wall, the impact of a flash on the surface that transforms it into something rigid.

For Martina Millà, curator of the exhibition, Mayoral’s landscapes, despite being unfavourable, insecure and precarious, are “an attempt to find a refuge amidst so much hostility through beauty.” Not in vain, the obstacles force us to halt in our steps and create, as Millà sees it, “a time of repose and contemplation in this state of unending research into an expectation, the results of a promise that we pass on from generation to generation though which is never fulfilled: the promise as an illusory exterior feature, and the gaze as a threshold, both encircling the subject and its interiority, its solitude beneath the elements.”

Violeta Mayoral (Almeria, 1988) is a multidisciplinary artist resident in Barcelona. Her work develops through artistic practice and theoretical research. Both paths are found in proposals that invite us to reflect upon the way interiority is revealed in the encounter with exteriority, a contact that often points to who is looking over the gaze itself.

Mayoral studied Communication at the University of Barcelona and specialised in semiotics at the UNAM (Mexico City).

Her solo exhibitions feature Un buen lugar para dar marcha atrás (2019) and Fuera de lugar (2020), both at Galería etHall in Barcelona. Her work has been seen in group shows at the Sala de Arte Joven in Madrid, amongst others, and has also been shown at contemporary art fairs like Swab.

Violeta Mayoral has published articles in A*DESK, at the Instituto Independiente de Crítica y Arte Contemporáneo, in the experimental art platform Lateral Addition and for the Department of History of Philosophy, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Culture of the University of Barcelona, amongst others.