Elena Mendizabal: The Thing Says
Leaning against the wall, lying on the floor or standing upright on the base their own form generates, the works Elena Mendizabal brings together in La cosa dice (The Thing Says) adopt the postures of a body that rises, rests or falls. They do so through the restraint of the beam, the plank and the block, which the artist has worked on between 2025 and 2026 until turning them into presences that establish an open, bodily relationship with whoever looks at them. Organised in three groups, the twenty-seven pieces trace an arc that runs from an emphasis on colour and materials to the carved word.
Arriba-Abajo (Up-Down, 2025–2026) groups together small pieces with a stepped profile that the eye travels along, climbing and descending as in a platform video game, bringing down to the scale of the hand the swing between what is won and what is lost. Their austerity, close to Malevich's architectons, coexists with intense pinks, browns verging on black and beads of rose quartz and jet, costume-jewellery stones that add a note of adornment culturally associated with the feminine. In the 2026 pieces, natural stone, placed just as it was found, takes the place of the gem and shifts value towards the matter that nature itself produces.
Mejor un río (Better a River, 2026) extends Ese quiebro, shown at La Casa Encendida. Two carved lines, one in burnished white gesso and the other tinted cadmium yellow, rise from floor to ceiling or recline against the wall, their undulating profile evoking both the bark of a tree and skin traced by the hand.
The group that gives the exhibition its title reduces sculpture to the essential, the single beam or two beams joined in an inverted T or an L, and entrusts part of its weight to the word, consistent with a practice in which writing has always accompanied work in the studio.
The letters derive from a Roman inscription on lead found in the Iberian Peninsula, which the artist traced by hand in several variants before having it carved by CNC, so that the mechanical process retains the oscillation of the gesture and lends these statements the gravity of commemorative epigraphy. Presented with deliberate neutrality, as statements belonging to public discourse, the phrases make visible the debate they contain simply by being fixed in wood.
Detached from their original source, the words reveal their capacity to be quoted out of context and to go on generating other possible meanings, while the number that accompanies them, promising an anchorage that remains withheld, allows each visitor to replace that context from their own position. The linear condition of the works activates the walls and corners of the gallery, and the posture of each beam modulates what its phrase says, calling for an attention that is more mental than optical.
The exhibition's title literally names what the visitor encounters, objects that carry words, and in the passage from the thing, which belongs to the order of the inanimate, to saying, which belongs to the human, it addresses the capacity of objects made by people to act in the social world. La cosa dice thus articulates three ways of making matter speak, sustaining in each the tension between the mute presence of the object and what, through it, comes to be said.
