Provocación mutua: Group show

At the center of this proposal, there is no answer, but a tension: how do form and matter relate to each other? Who organizes whom? How far does one give meaning and the other sustain it? What happens when neither yields and instead they confront, resist, and affect each other? This foundational friction is not resolved—it is worked through. Rather than obeying traditional hierarchies that oppose the rational to the sensitive, the symbolic to the corporeal, these works make the porousness of those boundaries visible. Here, thought is not separated from matter: it passes through it.

For centuries, form was thought of as a principle of order, control, meaning; matter, as chaotic, passive, formless. But this opposition, persistent as it is illusory, has been challenged by the history of art itself. The avant-gardes, feminisms, conceptual practices, and recent shifts toward the affective and the corporeal have overflowed this binary, revealing a materiality that is neither mute nor secondary, but active, sensitive, and thinking.

The focus is no longer on choosing one or the other, but on sustaining the field of tension that opens up when both coexist without hierarchy. It is not about canceling contradiction, but about inhabiting it. Some critical readings have suggested that the key lies not in redeeming matter or exalting form, but in dismantling the very dichotomy that separates them. In that sense, art does not resolve the tension: it turns it into a method.

The works gathered here share that orientation. They begin with the certainty that materials are not neutral: they carry memory, history, emotion, and conflict. Each functions as a field of translation between the physical and the symbolic, between what is touched and what is thought. Materiality is not just support: it is embodied thought.

In Ana María Rueda’s work, this tension is expressed in the relationship between painting, body, and symbol. Her pieces—fabrics evoking flags, covered in flowers, lines, and constellations—transform signs of power and dominance into surfaces of care and memory. The pictorial matter does not illustrate a concept: it makes it vibrate from within. The line, which might suggest military strategies or maps of conquest, is redrawn in an affective key: from flower to flower, from root to root. What once signaled control now proposes a relationship. On the back of the canvas, the routes turn into sky; the marks, constellations. The image does not impose itself: it lets itself be read. Form does not organize matter—it emerges from it. Rueda works with an aesthetic of shared fragility, where beauty does not conceal the wound but rather sustains it.

This correspondence also runs through the work of Margaret Mariño, though from a different density. Her large-format piece, built on raw sewn and intervened canvases, inhabits an aesthetic that oscillates between the beautiful and the ominous. The act of sewing, repeated like a mantra, activates a relationship between time, body, and memory inscribed into the very material. This is not an image constructed from the visual, but from the act itself: a manual choreography that leaves a trace. The canvas, treated like a soft archive, absorbs marks, resistances, and emotions. The burnt, intervened, or folded areas are not accidents: they are formal decisions that tension the composition from within. Fire, stain, and fold introduce a force that does not seek to control, but to affect. Unlike an image that imposes itself, here form opens to chance, to the incomplete, to what escapes. The unsaid, the untouched, also participates in meaning. There is a constant tension between the impulse that organizes and the matter that insists. Between order and rupture. Between the containment of format and the expansion of the sensitive.

In Erika Díaz’s work, softness becomes a form of resistance. Her textile sculpture—a monumental araucaria built with sewn fabrics—offers a critique of cultural, aesthetic, and colonial hierarchies. The fragility of the material is not weakness, but strategy: the soft object does not break—it adapts; it does not impose—but occupies space. In its assembly of the everyday and the ornamental, the European and the native, the work proposes a hybrid identity, in which the strange and the familiar intertwine without nostalgia for a lost purity. That tension is not resolved in equilibrium—it becomes an active form of material thought: sculpture as a space of translation between bodies, memories, and symbols. Weaving—literally and symbolically—is, here, a practice of resistance against forgetting and the loss of identity. As in other contemporary practices that materialize memory, the gesture is not illustrative but performative: sewing as archive, porcelain as narrative, the tree as collective body. Matter does not decorate; it remembers, transforms, and resignifies. Instead of representing a tree, Díaz embodies it: as emotional refuge, as shared root, as porous form for inhabiting history. In Proyecto Invasor, the soft becomes monumental, and the intimate, shared matter.

Mateo Zúñiga approaches this tension through a poetics of affective architecture. His paintings and installations, built from observation and personal experience, explore the relationship between structure, environment, and memory. The artist’s childhood home in Cali becomes the starting point for works where the built intertwines with the atmospheric, the domestic with the natural. There is no literal representation: there is material evocation. It’s not about showing spaces, but about making visible the way those spaces are remembered, breathed, and felt. Transparencies, shadows, and colors function as fragments of an emotional architecture that unfolds in the exhibition space. Matter is permeable, charged with time. Form, by contrast, does not fix—it vibrates, adapts, listens. The sensitive does not oppose the conceptual—it contains it. His work reconfigures the exhibition space not as a passive backdrop but as living matter. The paintings expand toward their surroundings; the wire sculptures extend the gesture into three dimensions. There is a discreet yet persistent materiality that gives shape to air, atmosphere, and the perception of time. In this practice, memory is not represented—it is inhabited.

In each of these works, the tension between form and matter is not resolved: it becomes structure, content, and language. There is form, but always unstable. There is matter, but never passive. What is offered is not a closed image, but a field in dispute—a space where body and idea engage in dialogue without hierarchy.

This is not art about the material or the conceptual. Here, art is the place where the idea becomes flesh and matter thinks. Each gesture is also a form of positioning: political, aesthetic, affective. Because it destabilizes learned forms, ways of seeing, and rhythms of production.

In a present saturated with efficient objects, clean surfaces, and immediate meanings, these works insist on the opposite: the soft, the uncertain, the in-process. And it is there—in the loose stitch, the unexpected stain, the faltering line—where art can still be a provocation.

Ana Lucía Arbeláez Z, curator