Linarejos Moreno

Madrid 1974

By: Álvaro de los Ángeles

Linarejos Moreno's work looks at the natural link between science, technology, art and capitalism. Using a wide range of materials, she tends to link a number of theoretical visual explorations of evocative issues in very different areas of study, such as the relationship between bodies in space, architecture as shelter and ruin, artistic displays as aesthetic and theoretical measures, modern industry as the basis (now dead and buried) of new, de-located, liquid output, etc. Science and art are the borders of a land heavily cultivated via theoretical speculations, graphic representations, industrial recreations, family and collective memory, books and cultural history.

For instance, in her project The Cloud Chamber (2017) she links Wassily Kandinsky's book Über das Geistige in der Kunst ['Concerning the Spiritual in Art'] with the graphic proofs obtained from the first Wilson cloud chamber, developed by Scottish physicist Charles T. R. Wilson to study cloud formation and optical phenomena in humid air. In the final form shown in the exhibition, she highlights the way in which Wilson's images, dating from 1911 to 1913, are shown, printed and mounted on hessian fabric (a technique that Moreno also uses in other series) and manipulated copies of Kandinsky's books. They are displayed in the recess within a double-T shaped iron girder topped with glass to protect and segment it. Two strands of wool run from the girder to two works hanging on the wall. The general ambience is one of delicate representation of the fine lines that link the history of art, science and the updating of certain theories that were decisive in the scientific and aesthetic development of society.

The same mise-en-scène (the use of photographic materials on hand-made supports, the spatial distribution, the historical documentation, the strands of wool, etc.) also appears in her projects STOP BACK SOON STOP (2020) and Art Forms in Mechanism (2009-2016). Black and white photos mounted on a hessian base to form a diorama and the use of partially manipulated old books or elements of industrial architectural/construction give her work a viewpoint all its own and a particular style. Also worth noting is her interest in linking ruins with capitalism as the two faces of a single coin whose edge represents history. Ruins are a core element in projects such as On the Geography of Green (2014- 2019) and the video The Building of a Ruin (2008), among others. In the first case the photos show how nature, with its diversity of plants and trees, has taken over public spaces in the southern United States that were once drive-in cinemas. In the video, a pointed arch built in ice gradually melts and falls, turning into a ruin in real time. For Moreno the idea of ruins seems not to be limited to physical, architectural elements but also to apply to social, production-related, industrial, artistic and theoretical states of ruin. She seeks to recover or recompose this whole set of actions in her relational projects.