Form in Abeyance. Bruna Ruiz Planella, Valentina Silva

The exhibition Form in Abeyance brings together the practices of Bruna Ruiz Planella and Valentina Silva to consider appearance as an open-ended process, subject to transformations that forestall its definitive closure. In their works, the figure acquires consistency without ever becoming fully fixed; it remains open to new configurations and retains, even when it appears recognizable, the possibility of becoming otherwise.

Bruna Ruiz Planella’s sculptures, conceived as heads in transformation, emerge from a material that retains the traces of its own process. Their faces melt, fold, and deform without ever fully stabilising, disrupting the idea of portraiture as the expression of a fixed identity. In Valentina Silva’s paintings, the gestural brushwork keeps form in a state of continuous oscillation: figures, bodies, and landscapes emerge and recede, resisting any singular definition.

What comes into view exceeds the categories through which we habitually organise visual experience, producing a sense of estrangement that arises not from the unfamiliar, but from what is uncannily close while remaining beyond immediate recognition. Form does not appear as something self-evident, but as a presence that calls for another temporality of looking: to linger, to let the gaze fall out of focus, to unlearn the reflex of recognition and allow form to unfold at its own pace.

Delay thus ceases to signify waiting and becomes instead a mode of attention. Only when the gaze relinquishes the urgency to identify can form reveal the complexity of its becoming, remaining irreducibly open and never fully exhausted by a single, definitive configuration.