Exhibitions
Mariaelena Roqué the art of making oneself visible
'UnaDonaUna' vindicates RocioSantaCruz for one of the freest and most experimental trajectories in Catalan art in recent decades.
Mariaelena Roqué is one of the unmissable visits of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend. Until November 21, RocioSantaCruz presents UnaDonaUna in Barcelona, a journey through the career of one of the most singular and difficult to classify artists of recent decades. A proposal that allows us to recover an artistic practice built from the freedom of languages and from a constant desire for experimentation.
Historically, Mariaelena Roqué's name has been closely linked to the Carles Santos Company, formed by Santos and Roqué, which the artist founded together with the musician and composer. That project became one of the most iconoclastic episodes of the artistic avant-garde of the eighties and nineties, with actions that provocatively combined music, dance, performance arts and visual poetry. But to reduce Roqué's career to this experience would be to limit the scope of a work that has traveled through numerous territories and that has always maintained an extraordinary creative autonomy.
His production is built precisely at this intersection between the plastic arts, sculpture, costumes, characters, stage action and audiovisual. Roqué does not ascribe to a specific discipline, but rather appropriates different languages and puts them in tension. His work is born from this constant displacement, from a practice that understands the limits between disciplines not as a border, but as a space of possibilities.
In his costumes-character-sculptures, the body and its psyche simultaneously become the support and subject of the work. The human silhouette expands, hides, fragments or transforms until it acquires a hybrid condition between body, object and sculpture. The costume ceases to be a simple complement to become a second skin, a body architecture or even an autonomous character. The body thus becomes a space of permanent experimentation, but also a territory from which to question identity.
This bodily dimension inevitably incorporates a political reading. From her position as a woman and artist, Roqué develops a critical view of the construction of identity and gender roles. The female body appears as a space of expression, transformation and resistance, far from any passive or conventional representation. Her commitment to women's rights crosses a practice in which identity is not a fixed category, but a reality in constant evolution.
The freedom to move between media allows us to understand his work as an essentially interdisciplinary practice, in which matter, body, image, movement and space establish constant relationships and transform each other. There is no clear hierarchy between these elements: they are all part of the same creative process in which art can appear simultaneously as an object, action, stage presence or image.
RocioSantaCruz thus proposes an approach to the universe of Mariaelena Roqué from its richness and complexity, vindicating an artist who has always worked on the margins of conventional classifications. UnaDonaUna is an opportunity to situate in the present a work that continues to challenge us for its capacity to transcend genres, question identities and understand the body as an artistic matter in permanent transformation.
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