Res Non Verba | Paloma Castillo: La Embajada | Madrid

 

Paloma Castillo presents her latest embroidery works at Galería Nueva under the title Res Non Verba. Eleven pieces in which the artist gives free rein to her particular way of translating news through embroidery.

 

A rabbit and some frogs fleeing between some reeds is Castillo's interpretation of the war in Ukraine after reading a report of a bombing on the Polish border. The bluish face of a man in front of a lit match is her reading of the origin of a wildfire in Valparaíso, Chile, caused by the carelessness of some young people smoking crack cocaine.

 

The artist – who previously worked as an editorial designer for newspapers such as Fortín Mapocho, La Nación and Diario Financiero – searches in current affairs for sources of inspiration for her textiles, focusing on the details that seem most peculiar to her and transforming something as ephemeral as a news item or a chronicle into a work of art.

 

The title of this exhibition, Res Non Verba, refers to Castillo's way of working, which, as she told our agency's microphones, is based on "facts rather than words" and tends to produce individual pieces rather than unified series.

 

In this exhibition, there are also embroideries of characters that, like icons, are symbols of her personal universe. A vampire crowned by a Hello Kitty bag. A Hindu god with three of the "bad chakras", as the artist puts it. Another interpretation of a samurai legend about a man with crab claws. Or, perhaps the most complex of all, a woman accompanied by a cat, reminiscent of the suffragettes of the Women's Social and Political Union of Great Britain (WSPU) who embroidered while in prison in the first decade of the 20th century.

 

Another embroidery represents the Chilean social outburst through a flame that can be seen behind a tablet that foretells a presidential communiqué from La Moneda Palace. This last embroidery sums up better than any other the contradiction between this analogue and parsimonious elaboration and the digital and instantaneous world. The handmade versus the industrial, the solid versus the liquid. A sarcastic look at the technology that is repeated in the security camera floating in the sky and that, like a narrative thread, summons us to Vicente Prieto Gaggero's exhibition.