The Monstrously Beautiful Art of Victoria Maldonado

Victoria Maldonado has been sewing since she was eight years old, when her grandmother taught her to knit to keep her hyperactivity at bay. Over time, at the Faculty of Fine Arts, she learned to work with ceramics and porcelain. One day, in a very organic and natural way, she merged both forms of craftsmanship. The result is monstrously beautiful: strange, even abject bodies, made of delicate porcelain and precious beads that hang—literally—from the Exhibition Hall of the UMA Rectorate. 'Making the Earth. Celebration of Opacity', curated by Luis Puelles, gathers until January 10 the latest creations of the artist from Malaga with a touch of theatricality.

The entire journey is a preparation for the final space, where eight pieces hang from the ceiling creating a choreography that is both unsettling and attractive. The silence and deliberate lack of light in a room painted entirely black add drama to a scene that captures all the keys to her artistic research. Victoria Maldonado (Málaga, 1989) makes "wild ceramics" where, despite having a clear methodology (ceramic impregnation), much is left to chance. "It has a life of its own," she admits. It all starts with a crochet structure that she creates without a fixed pattern, which she then immerses in a barrel of porcelain. After extracting it with help ("it's like a body-to-body war"), she lets it dry for at least a month and a half, before placing it in the ceramic kiln, where it is fired at 1,200 degrees.

Then the magic happens. "The knitting structure completely disappears. The porcelain solidifies and the fabric burns off." In this artistic process, skins or organs are formed, the body is no longer there and only the surface remains. It is at this moment that she fully intervenes, taking control of the work by giving it meaning, covering it with different fabrics and adding beads. The crochet knot leaves its mark on the porcelain, simulating the porosity of flesh, "like a torn wound."

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These are sculptural bodies with a monstrous aspect, "but not from a pejorative perspective." The monster has always been associated with "the dark, the abject," but for Victoria Maldonado, it is about "embracing emerging subjectivities" and generating new bodies "from difference." None are the same as another; none conform to a standard; all break the mold. They hang from the ceiling as if wandering through the room. "A body exempt from a wall, more three-dimensional and completely vertical, occupies a space and creates a conflict. It's like a choreography where the abject does not invade you but calls you to approach and adapt to it."

This staging invites you to contemplate them up close and in 360 degrees, as Victoria Maldonado adorns the 'bodies' with pieces of glazed ceramic, crystals, bells... This adds a dreamlike touch and, at the same time, "sweetens the abjection." "Something that repels at first sight yet is sweetened with the shine of the ceramics, has a grotesque kitsch aspect that interests me," she argues.

From the Beginning

The rest of the exhibition explains how she got there, from her final degree work where she began experimenting with porcelain and ceramics to that kind of slaughtered lamb with reminiscences of Rembrandt that she created from a sweater she sewed for herself. "It's like a mimesis of my own body."

The first of all was 'Signum Ipsa' (2014), where she appropriated the fundamentals of archaeology and fossilized her gestures, the imprints of her hands in clay, and presented it in an ark with the dimensions of her body, as if they had just been found and unearthed. She first researched ceramic impregnation with fabrics before moving on to crochet structures she made herself, more organic, which gave rise to unique shapes. First, she placed them on the wall, and there are her 2019 pieces. Later she placed them on a pedestal, like the two works she exhibits on an intervened pedestal, sculptures of porcelain and glazed ceramic 'dressed' with textile and velvet. And she ended up hanging them from the ceiling, her most recent and most striking series. Eleven years of artistic production that began at UMA and now returns 'home'.