June Crespo at the Guggenheim in Bilbao: bodies that burn

In its most basic meaning, the word vascular refers to the body's blood vessels, hollow tubes like pipes that transport blood from one place to another.

Without the internal pumping of all those pipes nothing works.

Something similar happens in botany.

There is a type of vascular tissue in plants that also functions as a conductive element.

It is full of complex tissues and as many layers as the vascular if we think about it from the syntax, where a certain positive entanglement appears.

Vascular seems like a verb although it is an adjective and carries that backpack typical of homophonous words, those that are pronounced the same but are written differently, as if it had a body magnetized to its own meaning that it cannot detach itself from.

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June Crespo (Pamplona, ​​1982) titled her exhibition at the Guggenheim in Bilbao under that term.

First success of this project curated by Manuel Cirauqui that has a lot of that same molecular biology.

Thirty sculptures from the last seven years act as communicating vessels and capillary networks.

The artist places herself at a crossroads where there is as much tension as gravity, as well as different temperatures, scales and implications that have to do with intimacy and power.

She does it voluntarily, trying to understand that space that circulates between her works.

Capture that which escapes.

For her, art is not so much a means of expression, but a way of elaborating and digesting what goes through her at various levels, whether personal, emotional, political or aesthetic.

A channel, a valve, a channel, a gate.

Hence, her work is an extreme inquiry, something like a probe launched into the dark, and her works translate into formal terms what the eye perceives beyond reason.

Something similar to what Clarice Lispector does in literature: she renounces telling stories to express sensations.

Hence her luminous intelligence.

The works seem to fit almost perfectly in the museum, even in dialogue with others such as the Bourgeois spider

Her sculpture is an anteroom and a reason for the encounter with herself and with the other.

So neither the place in which he places himself as an artist nor the place in which the viewer encounters is easy.

That is the challenge, very well resolved in this exhibition that avoids chronologies and groups the works under the idea of ​​affinity and kinship.

If you sharpen your eye you will see that the montage is full of triangulations.

Conversation as methodology and as fertilizer.

That is exactly what June Crespo is interested in sculpture, that a scenario of affection between subject, object and space is activated.

What we find is a symphonic exercise of couplings, synergies and overflows that has a lot to do with other artists such as Isa Genzken, Carol Bove or Bela Kolarova.

The materials of the works appear as assemblies of complex operations.

There are tubes and passageways, cuts and reassemblies, grafts and cuttings, masses and gaps.

Superpositions, inequalities and asymmetries.

Mutations and alterations.

Gestures that are sometimes seen and other times not.

Veils that cover and others that teach.

Prostheses on the walls of the museum, both outside the room and inside the walls.

There is a pollination of ideas and a carefully studied organic chaos that looks like a circular body made up of other bodies that twist together.

Something that is transferred to the wonderful catalog published by the Caniche publishing house, which focuses on understanding what ideas circulate between the texts.

'Am I an Object', 2022, work by June Crespo.Ander Sagastiberri

Many of June Crespo's works continue to take as their starting point the proportion of the human body in terms of height, extension and relationship to the ground, although this exhibition resituates the scale of previous works.

This is

Vascular

(2024), conceived specifically for the exhibition, and which occupies the heart of the room.

Large cylinders that cross the room look like necks or open mouths that communicate.

There is a certain attraction to the botanical that takes on an animal appearance with the change of scale.

We see it when he 3D scans certain plants and flowers, such as strelitzia, making the stem operate almost like a pipe.

Eroticism is evident in those expanded and elevated stems.

Along with them, we see their usual sculptural use of images expanded to large prints on the floor, and the presentation of industrial production supports, such as work tables or lifting platforms, amplified.

The idea of

​​display

is not new, nor are torsos and busts covered in clothing, although the way of working with textiles is increasingly less careful and sophisticated.

Use ready-made garments, with seams and openings that respond to the shape of the body.

Choose them by their color or texture: elastic or padded, warm or shiny, transparent or with a print.

Blankets, towels, rugs, bedding.

Always domestic fabrics.

Everything adds up to this project.

On the one hand, the exhibition, which makes visible the increasing freedom within sculptural practice in terms of use, forms and materials that coincides with the questioning of the meaning of the profession.

That is: sculptures that indicate multiple directions and vanishing points without closing a discourse.

On the other hand, the museum, in which June Crespo's works seem to fit almost perfectly.

Outside, with Louise Bourgeois's well-known spider,

Mama

, with her legs also patched and scarred.

Inside, with Giovanni Anselmo's retrospective full of ironic, delicate and abrasive gestures, open to the possible event.

The total conviction that June Crespo is in the right place at the right time.

'Vascular'.

June Crespo.

Guggenheim Bilbao.

Until the 9th of June.

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