ART CITIES: Madrid-Leonor Serrano Rivas

Despite being deeply rooted in scholarly research, the work of Leonor Serrano Rivas appears imbued by interpretation and free association; concatenating one thought after the other with a non-logical reading of things and themes. Hence, Dream logic is often used by the artist as a way to present layered sensorial environments where the viewer must forget the narrative impulse.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: carlier|Gebauer Gallery Archive

Leonor Serrano Rivas’ exhibitions speculate with a reimagination of a distressed reality on a different key as a reconstruction of the realm of imagination and fiction, as a theatre set-like, with artworks behaving as mediators and instruments both calibrating and measuring such a new cosmos. As the artist says “I am moving with my eyes closed. Feeling the touch of bodies, hearing children’s laughter, fleeting, close. As if I am in a pond with the weight of the water meeting my open eyes. I rest in a garden, daring the sun to dance over my eyelids; the sediments of light and shadows of leaves appear before my inner eye. Colored hues spread on the red inside of the lid; I feel my body briefly melting into its surroundings. Is this how feelings permeate, how thoughts transcend our tissue? Is it how we subsist and breathe through disparate bodies?” in Leonor  Serrano  Rivas’s solo exhibition “Para  un  ser  sumergido”, a large photographic skin wraps the inner gallery wall. Exposure to the sun has etched spectral compositions of flowers and leaves onto its surface. The analogue process of layering 16mm black and white film with organic material has allowed chemical residues and a touch of unexpected color to impregnate the film, as if dyed in an instant release of photosynthetic energy. I move behind this lingering eyelid like a lucid dreamer. It reveals its network of veins and forms and immerses me in its space. In the exhibition Leonor Serrano Rivas presents this and two additional new bodies of work that center on the life of plants. As narrative vehicles, the plants tell the tale of how we, all beings, form symbiotic relations with our surroundings. Thinking along the philosophy of Emanuele Coccia, Serrano Rivas regards our being in the world as to be immersed in it, having to eclipse the membranes of material distinction. It is like being submerged in liquid; a liquid that wraps itself around us, caresses us – and in its wet cradle, we warp and crescendo. In the middle of the gallery space, metal structures hold the mutated figures of fruit and plants. These hybrid flowers are covered in coats of crystals, which were deposited in a chemical reaction with vegetable acids in an electrolytic bath. Like the bronchial tubes of a lung, they reach out into the void, stretching their tentacles, breathing in. In this alchemist ballet, a new atmospheric world of inter-reliance and immanence seem to take root. In the third body of work, images of different roots and plants are woven together on a large piece of wool, willfully grafted and interlaced in a forced embrace. For Serrano Rivas, gestures of layering and translation are necessary architectural interventions to rewild the voice of nature. She employs the ancient Spanish rural tradition of weaving and in the form of a tapestry dyed with natural pigments, she allows the process of the plants’ metamorphosis to unravel. Suspended in front of the window, both sides of the weave remain visible, revealing how warp and weft, like us and our vegetable kin, interpenetrate and compose each other’s habitat.

Photo: Leonor Serrano Rivas, Malas hierbas, 2025, Wool tapestry, 116 x 185 x 5 cm, unique, © Leonor Serrano Rivas, Courtesy the artist and carlier | Gebauer Gallery

Info: carlier | Gebauer Gallery, Madrid, Calle de José Marañón 4, Madrid, Spain, Duration : 7/3-30/4/2025, Days & Hours : Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-14:00, www.carliergebauer.com/