Hay una palabra para nombrar la hora de la noche en silencio. Martín Soto Climent

By Paola J. Jasso

The title of this exhibition evokes a moment at night without naming it directly. As the final hours of the evening approach, there comes a brief moment of tenuous clarity that quickly turns into an absence of light, and forms begin to lose their definition. There is still time to tidy up and get ready for bed. Then, everything stops. This is the time when one must pay attention; in darkness, when everything is silent, forms rub against each other, vibrating in a fleeting darkness that will eventually give way to dawn.

Suggesting without revealing the details of the plot: that is where this show operates, from the standpoint of an obscurity that requires a moment of meditative calm in order to listen to the within, to distinguish the reverberation of forms, what we have inside.

Zhuang Zhou, a 4th century BC Chinese philosopher, said that the flow of life changes circumstances.

That premise of transformation and movement is found in the work of Martín Soto Climent, whose artistic practice strives to extend a bridge to the origin, to intimacy, to the play between matter and essence, in pursuit of a movement that orders and disorders time.His experiences in recent years, approaching and profoundly observing the natural world, have led him to experiment with different elements and their different material states, where beginning and end cyclically follow each other.

The point of departure for Martín Soto Climent’s work is not a precise idea, but rather an intention: the journey. Its twists and turns, certainties, and questions crisscross each other, until they find a balance that operates as a transformative gesture, as energy in movement. The artist himself calls it contundencia vital—“vital force.”

Many perspectives have sought to question the dualisms that constitute western thought, epitomized in a single narrative, a single perspective.

For Soto Climent, the terms of these configuring dichotomies—nature/culture, body/mind, human/non-human, darkness/light, rest/motion—are not mutually exclusive. They do not run in parallel to each other, but are mutually implicated; they are intertwined like webs with large gaps between the strands, leaving room for otherness to filter through. This entails rethinking the forms in which such forces interact. In what way is everything in a constant flux of transformation? At what point does matter reach that tension, ready to mutate, to fuse?

For the artist, the existence between the subjective, ideas, what takes form (the body), must be thought from an imbrication with the world, not as a play of antonyms or dissociations.

Some of the paintings, drawings, and exercises shown here are dust, but also reflection; they are line but also mass; they transmute. In this way, they make evident the friction between different materials. Soto Climent reveals not only objects themselves but also the way they interact.

It is in the passage of time and in its different bifurcations that the trail is traced; thus, the set of pieces here enter into dialogue and multiply their possible interpretations.

In the paintings of Caricias (Caresses), we find an almost microscopic gaze, a line that acquires volume, getting inflamed and connecting with what feeds it. We perceive a swaying of forms. The gesture and the growing awareness of the body impressing its action on the physical medium become important. We find multiple lines merging into one in the curvature of everything, exceeding the limit of the recognizable. In this process, eroticism and the drive for sensuousness guide the path of creation.

This new body of work starts off from the use of torn stockings (a regular feature of Soto Climent’s work) as a base and structure in order to remain on a spectrum that appears and disappears, that inhabits them.

The pieces presented here invite us to be with them, not just to be observed. The artist calls upon us to delve into the absorption of light, the play of colors and sensations that lay claim to desire. In the darkness, too, we find shadows, and scintillating sparks filter through those shadows.

Like a thread that becomes a web, we find the movement that connects, vibrates, gets agitated, and unravels that which is not manifest, without disturbing the silence.