'Fountain' by Alba Mayol

Until January 7, 2024, the Tecla Sala Art Center offers the exhibition Fontane , curated by Albert Mercadé. The exhibition revolves around the ancestral identity – in the words of the curator – of the artist Alba Mayol Curci (Barcelona, 1979). Despite the fact that he was born in Barcelona and trained there, and that he is currently part of the collective of artists resident in Salamina, in L'Hospitalet de Llobreta, Mayol has nourished his visual culture by devouring the Italy of which his mother is from. It is from the return to his own cultural roots that Mayol has built a whole that encompasses textures, fluids and words that have been synthesized in this project, Fontane .

Albert Mercadé points out that on this occasion the artist "drank from that virginal source that André Breton claimed for art, when it is conceived in its first subjective dimension, without defined or limiting concepts. [...] There the artist has rediscovered and renewed the interests that shape the axis of his artistic practice: the resignification of matter and words, from fragility and doubt, but also from subjective and experiential authenticity."

In the room, it all translates into an entrance marked by a door burnt from top to bottom, charred like the slopes of Vesuvius. The woods that make it up lose this condition to be just textures, wounded by the flames, which evoke the scar that the volcanic eruptions left in Pompeii and Herculaneum. In fact, Alba Mayol Curci has published a short ad hoc poem in honor of these ancestral flames: "The south is fire, they are flames, they are flames : those that consume languages, lives, natures. It is the fire of intense looks, of visceral verbs, also of volcanoes and irroting pavements. It is the flame of a past that returns knocking on the door of our present."

The exhibition delves into the atavistic from the aforementioned door to reach the central pieces, the fountains (1 and 2): irregular fired ceramic containers that follow the opposite rhythm to the civilized fountains, accumulate liquid to pour it and return it to Earth instead of giving it to humanity.

Fontane is an internal journey through the creativity and cultural identity of Alba Mayol Curci that invites you on a journey through fragility and sensitivity to discover that it is only through dislocations, silences and internal conflicts that we can understand each other better.