Interior is Patrícia Garrido’s new solo exhibition at Giefarte, with a single work that fills almost the entire exhibition area, conditioning mobility and spicing up our curiosity. This site-specific installation was a project developed in the last months of 2021, finished in the gallery space.

Upon entering the Giefarte exhibition room, we almost immediately feel a sense of claustrophobia. We are swallowed by the huge iron structure installed there. The only space to move around are the small corridors between the limits of the work and the gallery walls. We circulate slowly around Interior (2022) with curiosity about its interior, to which we have no access. The work is a huge iron structure almost seven meters long, built with old industrial shelf beams (with different sizes and colours), forming several grids. It looks like a construction in layers, where each one impedes our passage even more. Our bodies are impossible to pass through the structure. We are completely forbidden to physically reach its interior.

As we walk along the edges of the work, our presence becomes more and more anxious. We notice that our free movement is conditioned not only by the dense iron mesh, but also by the work’s great volume. Iron, the only material of the work, exalts our state by being an aggressive structure for the human body.

Only our eyes allow us access to this interior, which we curiously look at. Our body tries to move, looking for an empty gap between the beams to increase our vision. Even so, it is impossible to look at the work as a whole, because there is no space to move away from it. Interior (2022) is also drawn in the shadows cast on the gallery walls.

Patrícia Garrido seemingly problematises the act of seeing the work, just as Marcel Duchamp did in 1942 with Sixteen Miles of String, presented in the group exhibition The First Papers of Surrealism, America’s first major exhibition of surrealist art. This site-specific installation was a rope that ran through the entire exhibition area, creating a huge web that prevented the free movement of visitors and their approach to the other works. This blocked the viewer’s vision. Those visiting the exhibition had to move their bodies through the unfamiliar web of ropes, peering between empty spaces to observe the paintings and sculptures in the show. Marcel Duchamp reformulated the act of seeing an exhibition, generated new forms of approach and relationship with the work of art. With Interior (2022), Patrícia Garrido materialises this same dance between body, work and venue.

The goal is to make the work travel through several exhibition rooms, an installation in constant metamorphosis that fills different forms and volumes in each place. It is “a construction in a continuous process of reorganization, due to the impossibility of establishing an assembly plan at each presentation”.

The inaccessible Interior by Patrícia Garrido is on until May 13 at Giefarte.