Il CORPO DELL' ANIMA

Martín Soto Climent’s (Mexico City, 1977) work resides in the tension

between construction and transfiguration. His tactile grammar is grounded in

the fold-as-wound, the comma, and the minimal torsion of matter. The

surface behaves like a casing. Even the etymology of “lining” points to

something that protects through adherence. In Soto Climent’s work, the fold

functions as the figure of an interior that resists full visibility: it alludes to

the organ, the anatomical cavity, and the celestial vault.

“That same presence—imprecise, insistent—resurfaces decades later under

the name of Caramel Huysmanz. Not as a figure, but as a gesture: the fold”

.

These words, written by Soto Climent, introduce a presence that the Mexican

artist conceives as the exhibition’s fourth artist: Caramel, the soul of a young

man who died and, over time, became his friend and muse. Caramel settles

into Bugatti’s chair, grazes Ottolenghi Wedekind’s textiles, and retreats into

the hides of his psychopomp.

The chair by Carlo Bugatti (Milan, 1856 – Molsheim, 1940), datable to

between 1898 and 1902, presides over the exhibition. Here, the richness of

materials and ornamental density transform furniture into ceremonial

presences. The work is constructed from inlaid wood with floral motifs,

parchment, brass, zinc, pewter, and silk tassels. Material wrests form from

the neutrality of utility, carrying it into a register of ceremonial

intensification—from functional body to symbolic body.

In “Il corpo dell’anima” the body appears through margins, through the

sensitive supports of its indirect persistence, edges, and casts: a theater of

substitutions. The body is that which has left a place behind.

Within this same horizon sit the textiles of Herta Ottolenghi Wedekind

(Berlin, 1885 – Acqui, 1953), in which form becomes the sensory

manifestation of an invisible order. From the 1920s onward, through the

technique of klecksography and later through its translations into

embroidery, fabrics, tapestries, carpets, screens, and seat coverings,

Ottolenghi Wedekind developed symmetrical images arising from the

folding of a sheet of paper. Here again, the fold returns as duplication,

pressure, contact, and reversal.

For Bugatti and Ottolenghi Wedekind, the transformation of the existing

world entails its reconstitution into a unified poetic order, within the logic of

the Gesamtkunstwerk and refined exoticism. In Soto Climent, this

transformation manifests as the persistence of the residual, the reactivation

of what remains, in this case, textile scraps. One might speak of a post-

surrealist logic of remainder: not the irruption of the unconscious into

fantastic imagery, but rather the stubborn persistence of material once the

image has withdrawn. A world of marked, folded, hanging, exhausted,

sensual surfaces.

The exhibition space is constituted through a displacement: a field of

substitution in which absence becomes an active condition of appearance.