Written by África Prado

Alicante-born Luisa Pastor opens her first solo exhibition in Madrid this Saturday at La Cometa gallery, where she presents 24K. Escrituras de la diferencia, in which she poses a poetic and conceptual reflection on the different readings about the concept of “value” in works of art. 

Using noble metals such as 24-karat gold and 999 pure silver in sheets, Pastor presents a total of 18 works of different formats where her goldsmith pieces are embedded as ingots in the pages, in a game that aims to deconstruct the economic logic underlying the old ledgers on which she builds her works.

The artist from Alicante has spent years transforming approaches related to the economy and capitalism through art. Now, with this show “I want to close a cycle with the whole concept in an exhibition, since I had been presenting individual works at ARCO, at the Bogota art fair... but I had never put together the whole series in an exhibition, which is my first solo show in Madrid,” she points out.

In 24K. Escrituras de la diferencia, Luisa Pastor gathers some of her great pieces carved around the concept of surplus value (Plusvalía Oro 24K or Plusvalía Plata 999), in which she carries out her process of dialogue with materials and tears up the pages of accounting notebooks, which she finds in antique shops, and turns them into thousands of pieces of cellulose, converting the books into urban architectures based on tiny paper boxes.

But he also introduces new elements such as the gold rafts, made from the Muisca raft or golden raft of pre-Columbian goldsmithing found in the Gold Museum in Bogota, Colombia. Of these, he has made six different pieces, “small jewels on the same theme, like the Goldberg Variations,” says Pastor.

A nod to the adoration of the material

This work is a nod to the medieval masters who worked with gold and silver leaf, from a double position: on the one hand, that of (a)gilding the action of putting gold on a surface; and, on the other hand, that of worship as that respect for the material so often used in temples, with that divine character. All this, through a collection of works made on the basis of time “where the act of stopping and contemplating is already a rebellion”, as they point out from the gallery, where the exhibition can be seen until January 4.
“There is no doubt that his aesthetic contains a mystique of beauty. In her works there is a dialogue between volume, light, matter and movement, of drawing in space, of creating volume out of emptiness,” describes curator Alicia Ventura.

Este trabajo es un guiño a los maestros del medievo que trabajaban la lámina de oro y plata, desde una doble postura: por una parte, la de (a)dorar la acción de poner oro sobre una  superficie; y, por otra parte, la de adorar como ese respeto por el material tan utilizado en los templos, con ese carácter divino. Todo ello, a través de una colección de obras hechas a base de tiempo "donde el acto de parar y contemplar ya es toda una rebeldía", como señalan desde la galería, en la que se puede ver la muestra hasta el próximo 4 de enero.
"No cabe duda de que su estética contiene una mística de la belleza. En sus obras dialogan el volumen, la luz, la materia y el movimiento, de dibujar en el espacio, de crear volumen a partir del vacío", describe la comisaria Alicia Ventura.