Overflowing Body, Place in the World: An Interview with Valentina Attolini

I walk through Narvarte to meet Valentina at her studio, but find her at the corner, buying coffee and an apple braid. It's a November Thursday, and she's wearing a pink wool skirt. Once inside, she lights a cigarette, using a seashell as an ashtray.

Valentina's artistic journey perhaps began the day she brought some nylon stocking artworks to her painting class. "It wasn't that different from painting," she explains. "The transparency of the fabric allowed me to create tones and shapes—shapes that I constructed, but also those suggested by the seams of the stockings."

Her focus on the body was solidified in Habitable (2021). "It felt strange to make sculptures about the body and see them as something external, detached. I wanted to create a sculpture that could share the bodily experience," she says, searching for a photo to show me. "I had all these scraps of fabric left over from the paintings made with stockings, so I sewed them together to create a piece that you could physically enter."

Fabric, wire hoops, and hangings also featured in her next project, Eco (2021), part of the exhibition Furia y Poesía. 10 años de Atelier Romo at Arte Abierto. Suspended by invisible threads, the hoops moved freely, creating tones and colors as they overlapped. Eager to activate the installation, Valentina collaborated with Ariana Ángeles to create a choreography. Julián Sieiro provided the music, and they recorded a video: Eco II.

Valentina was already on the verge of performance art. La obsesión del polvo por volverse aliento [The obsession of dust with becoming breath] (2022), made the following year, stands as one of her most remarkable works. After her grandmother's death, Valentina’s father gifted her the hip prosthesis left from the cremation. “It was a sweet gesture, but also intense,” she recalls. Later, she proposed a joint performance with her father, where they performed actions blending sound and movement to evoke presence and memory.

A series of difficult experiences drove her to seek refuge in painting. She started writing about what she felt and tried to translate those emotions onto her canvases. Her reflections on Contra la nostalgia, las Pulgas [Against nostalgia, Fleas] (2023), a collective exhibition at Arróniz, still resonate:

I understand my paintings as vital spaces for ambiguity. Places where landscapes, bodies, objects, and flows emerge from sensations and reveal themselves intuitively. These are unstable sites where the gaze can enter through cavities and wander between lines. Scenes that are continuously forming, establishing a space-between, a dialogue without fixed associations, allowing an elastic dance of possibilities for being or signifying.

She digs through the canvases leaning against the wall and brings out two untitled paintings, each 100x150 cm.

Valentina Attolini. I think the paintings I began making at that time came from emotions I was holding in, which is why they feel so... –she says it as I think it– visceral.

Lia Quezada. It continues your interest in the body.

VA. Yes. They’re different things, but they stem from the same curiosity. One comes from a more external, physical place—the movement of the body in space. The paintings come from something hidden, like from inside the body, from a more emotional place.

We then talk about Es un lugar que no existe [It Is a Place That Does Not Exist] (2023), her solo exhibition at RAM: Red de Arte Mexicana. I remember seeing some of the paintings on her Instagram. Red and pink hold a significant place in the works, and in a way, they resemble an endoscopy. There's always a part that's more concentrated—with color and detail—and another with more air. There’s something unsettling about them. They give me the feeling of having my ears underwater.

The idea doesn’t seem strange to her. For that exhibition, she performed Naturaleza muerta y apetito [Still Life and Appetite] (2023), where, among other actions, she ate oysters from the hands of the participants. The performance, she says, helped her understand the paintings she was making. The oysters and the shapes that appeared had something in common.

VA. They gave that sensation…

LQ. Watery.

VA. Watery, but to a certain extent, gross. I mean, they aren’t comfortable to look at.

In September of this year, she opened Sonámbulos, los párpados lloran [Sleepwalking, eyelids weep] (2024) at Unión, where she exhibited some of the monotypes she created during her six-week residency at SOLOS. The monotypes depict images from her dreams, fed by the objects and plants in the residency, the books she was reading, and a recent trip to the beach.

As she waited for the layers of monotype to dry, Valentina started keeping a journal, which I’m lucky to borrow. In the following days, I leaf through it, reading her notes, carefully unfolding sketches tucked inside. I find annotations about her dreams, questions she asks herself ("how to create a space within?"), verses by Raúl Zurita, technical instructions, plans for pieces ("dioxin purple + burnt sienna", "corner format"), and notes from a weekend in Malinalco. In one corner, a phrase summarizes the experience of the practice: Using a journal means setting aside a desperate search that only happens in painting.

Before we leave, I ask if she feels any changes coming in her artistic practice. After thinking for a moment, she answers, "Before the SOLOS residency, my paintings were almost always vertical. While working on the monotypes, I became interested in horizontal formats—long rather than tall. I felt they allowed for a more narrative space, not just to show scenes but to tell stories. I want to keep exploring that."

Translated to English by Luis Sokol