BELÉN URIEL: Rayo Verde

About

The Green Ray is a novel by Jules Verne’s whose inspiration comes from a rare optical phenomenon of the same name. It occurs shortly after sunset or before sunrise, when a green light is visible for a very short period of time. In Verne’s hands, this natural phenomenon morphs into a romantic novel that idealises this event and endows it with magical qualities affecting the lives of its protagonists. Verne defines this ray as follows.

“a green which no artist could ever obtain on his palette, a green of which neither the varied tints of vegetation nor the shades of the most limpid sea could ever produce the like! If there is a green in Paradise, it cannot be but of this shade, which most surely is the true green of Hope”

In Rayo Verde, Belén Uriel presents a new body of work that looks at the idealisation of nature and the ways in which this one is produced and commercialised. We are invited to witness, not without a certain irony, the many times in which nature has been captured and recounted, separated from the body, and turned into a scenario. Taking inspiration from consumer items created to engage with a wild environment, such as helmets, body protections, or outdoor furniture, the artist creates for this exhibition a new series of sculptures that questions the vulnerability of the body, the violent use of its anatomy and the mediation of leisure.

Uriels’ poetic language makes use of bronze, iron and glass to create a body of work that echoes the multiple strategies that consumer society uses to isolate and define the boundaries of our bodies. Slowly produced by the artist in her workshop, each work on show embraces the unexpected through a dialogue with the materials and its occurrences. In her robust yet fragile sculptures, everyday objects seem to reunite with their own beauty, escaping from their usual serial production to morph into almost organic elements. This delicacy in Uriel’s process builds a subtle and suggestive constellation of works where shades of green emerge as metaphors for unattainable hope.