Julieta Beltrán

PALMA presents From the tip of the fingers to the center of the guts, an exhibition by Julieta Beltrán.

“I feel like spitting out the skeleton.” I remembered this phrase when I saw some of Julieta’s paintings. I have heard my best friend say this phrase repeatedly throughout our years of friendship. I have never known exactly what she refers to, but I can suspect that it is when you feel that anxiety has confiscated your being, or when you feel fed up with being you; or fed up with being a woman, to a limited extent. This visceral discomfort of inhabiting your body, of feeling the wind blowing inside your own guts. A naked body, crouched, exposed in a room where nothing is shown, except itself, because it is directly evident through a shrill light, like a reflector, as if subjected to someone’s scrutiny. The motionless eyes that coldly stalk you as if they knew that you are guilty of a crime but they cannot betray you, they only observe you as you walk around the room. It all begins with an accident. Spilling a glass of wine on the carpet, throwing a few drops of sauce on the blouse. A stain triggers the gestation of a form. This is how the work begins, starting from a controlled accident. Beltrán begins a narrative from a stain of paint, her dialogue with the canvas is like a report; it shows her the path to follow, and she shows it the memories she has been keeping; memories of her body, of the bodies of others, mentions of her two homes and of the different autumns she has witnessed. There is a reverie in her pictorial work. Figures of diluted strokes that externalize themselves like an apparition, finding you unable to determine their presence. The effect of seeing a ghost. Silhouettes that reveal a wavering sensuality and share the longing and vigor that intimacy brings. Again, across the room, motionless eyes are watching you. Today everything becomes clear. In “From the tip of the fingers to the center of the guts” Julieta shows a video where she weaves herself into a bundle of wool that seems to be formed by her entrails that she braided to knot like a second skin. A somatic plot that she spun little by little, as if she were accumulating her uncertainties and anguish in each weave. “Wool is a material that holds memory” Julieta told me when she spoke to me about the wool knot; she told me that the knot could take a long time to form but that it could quickly fade away. I still don’t distinguish at what moment this action is reflected as a performance piece; if these memories traced on a canvas had the need to be narrated in the living flesh, or if they first existed embodied and were later projected onto the canvas. The artist also exhibits an installation; the knot of the present body. The eager body, satiated by the impressions that the lump was plotting not only with its viscera, but also with those of many other bodies, and now all of these are united by the same belly, satisfied. I wonder if I am there too. In the vulnerability of nakedness and intimacy, in bed tangling my entrails with those of someone else, in the scrutiny of the bright moon that reviews every part of my scarcity. Why does how we are valued as women affect us?

— Miriam Hernández Hernández