Erlea Maneros Zabala, born in Bilbao in 1977, first trained as a painter. In the last twenty years, she has established a dialogue between contemporary image production and pictorial abstraction as a case study. Closely exploring some of the dynamics linking art history to outside events, she has built up a body of two-way works that subvert the conventional productivist logic of art and question processes, by constructing a timeframe that is not necessarily linear.

One such piece is Untitled (2012-2020), which arose out of Maneros Zabala's research into the Orientalist photography collection at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and her reading of a nineteenth-century handbook written by English craftsman Charles W. Woolnough on the technique of marbling, first introduced to Europe from Asia along trading routes. Untitled (2012-2020) is intended to be an industrial replica of a set of motifs taken from sheets of paper decorated using this technique. The structure of the sculpture is an allusion to the screens which — according to Woolnough — were used in marbling workshops to separate the craftspeople working on different tasks and prevent them learning other skills, in an early forerunner of the division of labour later favoured in capitalist production modes. This device enables the artist to explore the relationship between art, economy and colonialism.

Maneros Zabala's research was initially presented at REDCAT (Los Angeles) in 2011. A version of the sculpture was included for the first time at her solo show 'Pilgrimages for a New Economy', at the CarrerasMugica gallery in Bilbao in 2012. Some years later, in 2016, an exhibition of her work at MNCARS as part of the Fisuras programme included two sculptures from the same series which fashioned a dialogue with her earlier works, specifically with a set of paper-based pieces from Exercises on Abstraction, a long-running series begun in 2007. These exercises are made by immersing offset paper (commonly used in printing) in Indian ink. The result is an image that emulates certain irreplicable artistic processes alluded to in certain periods of abstract pictorial art, while at the same time speaking to the mechanical processes associated with craft work. Inevitably, too, they evoke the marbling technique Maneros Zabala was by then investigating. The outcome is an encounter that re-signifies the two works, adding new layers that are reminiscent of the 'engaged material consciousness' American sociologist Richard Sennett talks about in his book The Craftsman, which analyses the motives for sustained craftsmanship.

Maneros Zabala went on to create Temporal Arrangements (2018), a series of pieces painted onto printed grids on photographic paper. She there projects media images (limited by the artist in quantity and time) which she sketches in gouache to create a tangle of gestures that reflect a renewed interest in the systematisation of the gestural. Untitled (2012-2020) forms part of this dichotomy. However, it belongs to a later period in which the artist goes one step further, bringing new problems and solutions to the research, whilst managing to avoid tendentious results or timeframes.

Untitled (2012-2020) consists of eight stainless steel slats. Onto four of them, the artist has digitally printed examples of marbling taken from the collections in the Getty Research Institute. The other four have been left unaltered, giving protagonism to the material whilst also reflecting the marbling in the other pieces. The result is to project a symmetry and highlight the notion of the replicability of the gesture. The zigzagging sculpture is supported solely on the eight acute-angled vertices, one per piece. These points allude to the pattern created in some of the marbling, but also emanate a certain sense of instability, fragility or danger, especially since they resemble cutting tools. Untitled (2012-2020) was first presented in Bilbao in 2012. For strictly material reasons, it was subsequently destroyed and remade. It was double dated (2012-2020) to reflect this adjustment, thus inadvertently bringing a new layer to the conceptual basis of the project.

Ángel Calvo Ulloa