True encounters are rare.

The encounter between Dani Soter and Cécile de Beyssac is what we can call a “skin-deep encounter.” An exchange driven by the shared desire to create an artistic production related to vital situations, linked to the realm of the intimate, where skin serves as a central element of this joint fabrication.

Skin is a protective covering that shields us. A point of contact with the outside, it makes us visible to others. It is an apparently silent medium, yet full of places ready for the exercise of sensitization and the perception of what comes from the outside. With each intervention, there is a change in the state of the body, which, affected, calls for the establishment of another body. The body is a field of affections.

States are provisional but constant. And they leave marks. They provoke reactions, combined with the formation of memories, which are added to the invisible plane, the territory of the subjective. One may think that the marks are fixed and immobile, but in reality, they only sleep, waiting to be revived when a new encounter happens, something that resonates with the mark, re-signifying its existence for the subject.

It is at this point in my reflections that I place the works of both artists in this exhibition. The inventions on paper and the objects they propose emerge from one of those moments in which a change of state occurred, bringing about the desire for a repotentiation of the printed marks, which, for both artists, are closely linked to the passage of time and the quality of their existence in their life paths.

What appears when looking at the group of works are landscapes modulated in territorial spaces, where the skin, which covers the volumes of this topography, is subject to life's storms. The strokes, splashes, stains, decals, creases, and layers are like inscriptions of time, actions, and situations on the body, which can either weaken it or make it stronger. A reminder of the impermanence to which we are all subjected. It is both the allusion to the delicate, fragile skin, beige or rosy, the place of the desire to communicate with the body, in Dani Soter’s work, and the inventory of a transient anatomy, subject to accidents and wear, incorporated by the flow of life, in Cécile de Beyssac’s.

Here, the artwork points to the affirmation of a new topography, driven by the restlessness and desire to understand the new state that arises from the accumulated experiences.

May 2015