June Crespo: Acts of pulse

P420 is pleased to present Acts of pulse, the first solo exhibition by the Spanish sculptor June Crespo (Pamplona, 1982) in the spaces of P420, after Foreign Bodies, the tandem exhibition in 2018 with John Coplans, curated by João Laia.

“The English word pulse is a powerful term whose sound already suggests the various nuances of its meaning, each with its own poetic sense: it indicates an impulse of the body (heartbeat, detected by taking one’s pulse), a rhythm (as in music), and also a force, in its meaning of vital energy. Acts of pulse, the title chosen by June Crespo for her first solo exhibition at Galleria P420, artistically translates this surprising verbal resource, a word that encompasses multiple movements of thought inside a single written sign, and also a quality intrinsic to the language of sculpture: the form of a work expresses the shape-shifting nature of the material, which continues to transform and to reformulate reality since it contains other possible expressions of the world (the cosmos is in-habited, already lived inside), like an elementary particle that indefinitely combines with others depending on the forces in action and the interactions they trigger.” Marinella Paderni explains in the exhibition’s introductory essay.

June Crespo has created a series of new works for the occasion, in which she experiments with new combinations of materials, like bronze castings in dialogue with textiles, resins, steel and cement. The proximity of such different substances—some of them traditional, others belonging to the contemporary world and an everyday dimension—creates a particular form of disorientation: the surprise of the encounter is mediated by the natural way these elements interact in a new overall structure. Crespo’s work takes form in the making, becoming the place where something “happens.” This instinctive method undermines any relationship of hierarchy among the elements, which are simultaneously base, frame, support and sculpture.

“What forms are taken on by the space between the tongue and the palate? How does it become when the movements of the jaw and the internal surfaces of the mouth shape it? 

The material of the body is made of apparent opposites that incessantly move and are transformed, creating a continuity of forms that are never equal. Rigid and soft, bony and fluid, solid and flexible, the human body has resonances with other natural elements that echo in their image, as in the case of a flower and the movement of its petals, which remind us of a mouth as it opens.”

As Marinella Paderni always observes, the Spanish artist investigates the expressive possibilities hidden inside things, the transformations of materials that find new formal and conceptual solutions thanks to the novel and arcane processes of sculpture, making a positive contribution to the discourse on the future of the contemporary sculptural language in an era in which the physicality of the world has to come to terms with various forms of distancing.

The exhibition at P420 comes prior to solo exhibitions scheduled for 2023 at the Centro de Arte Dos de Majo in Madrid, and for 2024 at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.