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One Hammer Coming Your Way


2021

Solo booth ARCO Madrid

You May Come Full Circle, group show at Cibrián

2021

Al Alcance, group show at Dilalica Barcelona

Linen fabrics dyed with roots, logwood chips, and iron solution. Steel rods, pins, oil pastel and spray paint. —Dimensions variable


One Hammer Coming Your Way is an installation composed of large linen sheets that have been dyed, drawn, and painted onto, and then hung from the ceiling, like a “biombo” or tent. You can walk between and around them - the works form an environment that asks to be wandered/meandered through in close physical proximity.

The dyes that Esther employs are sourced from turmeric and iron (vivid orange-yellows, and the black of corroded metal), among others, and the works have been prepared in her domestic spaces, using the resources to hand: stove tops, bathtubs, pots and containers. The colours spread across bathroom tiles and kitchen walls, they run into cracks and stain them, making their presence known.

The drawings and paintings on their surfaces are arranged into layers and strata. The oldest, which were applied before the dyes, have been cooked into the fabrics. They have been partly boiled away and remain visible only as subtle, ghastly, underpaintings and residues. The corporal sense of the body, of its labour and playful movements, is ever-present in the hands-on processes of production, and also in the large scale of the sheets; they could easily envelop a body pressed into the fabric. The lines and traces are gestural and expressive - revealed in subtractive and additive processes of layering.

When installed, the works cluster together and form a dense pack or group. Like trees in a forest or a tight group of people who are taller than you. The installation brings back images of childhood, of when the world felt too big for you. Some of the textiles are semi-transparent, and present a maze of images and lines that can, to an extent, be seen through, allowing your eye to combine one surface with another while moving between them. The works have no designated front or back, and can be encountered again and again. When you enter this maze its shifting surfaces announce and expose themselves as unfixed. They float and ripple with the movement of the air.

The linen sheets come together to form a spatial and pictorial environment. They are also a shelter or dwelling, with moveable walls and screens. Perhaps somewhere to rest or spend time with others. They implicate the entire space of the gallery that they are installed in, gently repurposing its walls, empty spaces, and ceiling, and bringing it in line with their own changing uses.

(...) relates to the figure of the fallen angel, a character which inspired the new work by Esther Gatón. Gatón’s large canvases are dyed with roots, wood and iron sulfate, shadowing her abstract drawings in a rich, black pigment. By repeating the dyeing process many times, Gatón creates a work in which various layers become visible. To make this series, the artist immersed herself in her London studio, not much bigger than the canvases themselves, causing a self imposed loss of orientation. The forms of these drawings are theresult of Gatón’s sensitive reaction to this dizziness.

Excerpt from curatorial text by Martin Lahieté.