Inmaculada Salinas (b. Seville 1967) frequently works with standard paper formats, such as A4 and A3, to create large mosaics or sequences often supplemented with photographs from various sources: images taken from the press, from the artist’s own extensive photographic archive, from art history, and by Salinas herself. These photos are integrated into her compositions through drawing or physically as collage. Many of these collages incorporate drawings – made with graphite pencils, markers, and colored pencils – whose origins, arising in many cases from art history itself, add systematic patterns that further complicate the relationship between art and productive labor.

Eco #2 (2023) is a polyptych comprising 35 A4-sized drawings arranged in a mosaic that forms a pattern of concentric squares. The impetus is making labor visible, with each piece documenting a specific day’s work to form a meticulously crafted whole. The resulting image is seemingly pleasant and deceptively decorative; however, this detachment breaks down upon closer inspection, revealing the piece’s underlying concept. The viewer reads “Work day” on each fragment, followed by the number of the day it was created: “Work day 01,” “Work day 02,” “Work day 03” ... up to thirty-five. “Work days, that’s how they are. Not with the aim of glorifying labor, but rather of making it visible. The working hours, the unsustainable, the unpaid, the ignored, the female...,” Salinas explains. Thirty-five workdays, systematically recorded and counted, like a diary totally divorced from the romanticized notion we have been sold of art and los artistas. Yes, los, male artists, especially the art created by males – obviously not by all, but certainly by many. This may be why Inmaculada Salinas’s work, even when it seems purely pictorial, is subjected to decisions establishing a distance from such notions. The “impulse versus gesture” dichotomy emerges, as Mar Villaespesa observes, adding that “there is no initial sense of gesture in her painting, despite the interaction between painting and the body, nor is it geometric painting, even though it is almost exclusively structured by lines.” In terms of color, she notes it has “always been functional,” and the approach “has been closer to the semiotic and to serialism.” Perhaps now, thirteen years after the text was written, a through line of work has emerged that is hard not to associate with the geometric. However, while formally Eco #2 and other works of the same kind could be viewed within that framework, reading them only from that vantage would oversimplify and disable them.

The series of work diaries that includes Eco #2 reflects a constant in Salinas’s practice, of images leading into others, which in turn lead into still more in succession. This process is evident in works such as Calle (2023), where the images and drawings cut and complete each other in the next one, and in the next, the same happens, generating a sequence that closes when we understand that the last leads in the same way into the first. Thus, a narrative emerges successively interconnecting the appendages of the composition. Similarly, this approach is evident in works like Eco #1 and Eco #2 (2024), and in the series Diario Diana Work 1 and 2 (2023) and Diario Diana 1, 2, 3, and 4 (2023). The method varies: here, large-scale drawings fragment, revisiting recurrent chromatic patterns – once again determined by the sequence imposed by her box of pencils – but still finding continuity in their immediate neighbors. Together, they form the pattern, once again of the semiotic and of serialism, with the title Eco alluding to its reception. "Female labor and more labor, in service of what? Of everyone and everything except their own voices,” the artist adds.

Eco #2 was exhibited at the stand of the galería 1 Mira Madrid at ARCOmadrid in 2024. 

Ángel Calvo Ulloa