MAISTERRAVALBUENA presents its third individual exhibition of works by Maria Loboda, entitled “Omniabsence”, in which the artist immerses us in a private, secret, singular world; in the inner sphere of a person we don’t know, but of whom we see some traces.
The word “Omnipresent” (present everywhere, a quality attributed only to God) has no antonym in the dictionary. No-one and nothing can be absent everywhere. The non-existence of the word “Omniabsent”, used to title the exhibition and the series of sculptures shown here, helps Maria Loboda to examine in depth the qualities that are outside the logic of language and that project underlying emotional states, in the anticipation of their being real. Electronic devices that in the 1980s and 1990s were objects of desire, with their sirens, flashing lights and shiny metal structures, are presented here covered with snow, their cassette decks gaping as though the snow were emerging from inside them, silenced forever. Unusable and enthroned as modern relics, they become metaphors for impossibility.
Along with these contemporary totems, the exhibition presents the series of photographs entitled “Sleeping with Gods”. The photographs show the arms of a male character who, lying on his bed, is leafing through the pages of a glossy catalogue of Asian antiques. Unlike the stereos, these artefacts are centuries old, and the desire for them and their inaccessibility has only increased in the last few decades. The only light in these nocturnal scenes comes from a torch we glimpse in some of the photographs. This almost furtive glow dramatically lights the illustrations of exquisite porcelain objects, elevating them to symbolic status like a Vanitas. The title (Sleeping with Gods) alludes to the quality that can be afforded to material and pagan objects and to their status of perpetual aspiration: in the photographs, the character daydreams, not by means of the objects converted into deities, but through their printed representations in a catalogue.
“Omniabsence” or the quest for the perpetual in the transitory, a dazzling contradiction enveloped in yearning and nostalgia.
