Gestos compartidos. Mireia c. Saladrigues / Marcelo Expósito

The work of Mireia c. Saladrigues and Marcelo Expósito shares a way of understanding art as a space for care, memory, and collective reflection. Using different methodologies, both artists bring to light processes, knowledge, and gestures that often remain in the background, inviting us to view art as a practice connected to life and the social context.

Comments on Illustrated Violence is the general title of the collection of works created by Marcelo Expósito in Italy during a year-long work cycle, based at the Spanish Academy in Rome (2022–2023). It is a constellation of interrelated works, consisting mainly of visual and musical artefacts derived from scriptural and sound experiments, fundamentally through the articulation between handwritten and printed texts, voices and documentary sounds. A cycle of works developed in Italy, which constitutes the political laboratory of a contemporary double-sided phenomenon spreading across Europe and resonating around the world: on the one hand, the rise of new forms of fascism derived from the neoliberal collapse, and on the other, the difficulty of updating in the present the global insurrections that emerged around 1968. Two closely related issues.

Mireia c. Saladrigues explores the inherent fragility of a material long revered for its nobility and resistance, delving into the inevitable degradation and transformation of marble. Through extensive research into acts of iconoclasm committed against Michelangelo’s Pietà and David, her recent works expose the fractures left by hammer blows, along with scattered fragments and tiny particles of marble dust released upon impact. Some works integrate diagnostic and restoration procedures, while others employ unique techniques—such as stamping with pulverised marble or hammering a pencil on paper— to further develop the changes in David’s crystalline structure. Mireia c. Saladrigues’ research goes beyond understanding iconoclasm as a form of artistic reception, also approaching it from the perspective of new materialism, contemplating the inherent qualities and behaviours of the masterpiece itself. Martellata_14.09.91, together with her artistic productions Crederrei, se fussi di sasso, forms the central axis of Saladrigues’ doctoral thesis, which documents cases of alteration (human and non-human) in cultural heritage.