MADRID.- Galería Elvira González, opens APENAS TRANSITAR (Barely Passing Through), the eleventh solo exhibition by sculptor Juan Asensio (Cuenca, 1959) at the gallery. The show features 20 sculptures and continues the path begun in his two previous exhibitions, Verba naturae and Contra natura, in which the artist examines the relationship between nature and geometry.

Asensio describes himself as essentially a rational person, and geometric order is the central axis of his work. His interest in nature stems from this: the need to understand how the world is constructed and to uncover the patterns that pulse beneath all things. Over the years, that trajectory has gradually reversed. Whereas at first geometry was almost everything, barely altered by subtle movements, today it must be sought within an increasingly organic language.





That same trajectory gives the exhibition its title. For Asensio, the natural world is so overwhelmingly complex and varied that he can barely scratch its surface; behind everything we see there is always a reason, with almost no room for chance, and it is precisely this rational territory of patterns and reasons that he moves through, without pretending to exhaust it. The title also carries a more personal note; an awareness of being, in the face of such vastness, an ephemeral and insignificant being whose life is no more than an instant.

APENAS TRANSITAR is, according to the artist himself, the exhibition with the greatest variety of forms, colours, materials, and textures he has presented to date, though it is conceived as a space of calm for reflecting on nature and its configurations. Two distinct bodies of work coexist in the exhibition. On one hand, pieces with bold, regular contours that appear frozen in time, in an embryonic and latent state, prior to developing and occupying the space around them. On the other hand, sculptures that revisit his studies on the curvature patterns of plant surfaces, this time based on thistles whose tips the artist trims and simplifies; these are not leaves, but rather the artist's own interpretation, focused on the study of surface beyond the literal form of the leaf.

Alongside these are three alabaster sculptures in which Asensio continues to play with the material's transparency; one of them more expansive in form, and another that seems to evoke the impact of a natural phenomenon.