05/01/2026
Love Letter until May 9 with works by Solange Adum Abdala, Rosamunde Bordo and Amber Frid-Jimenez.
Rosamunde Bordo alludes to love as alchemical transformation. A glass alembic is a vase holding a mysterious potion. A copper etching presents a laconic figure by the window. There is the tracing of the first word that opens correspondence with a longing appeal—“Dear”—and a lock closed on a deck of cards. The Surrealist gesture is plain to see: love is encounter, at once chance and necessity. But it can also be painful, and there are no guarantees. As Naveau writes, “the courage of the partner in love is linked to the confrontation with the real, to the impasse, to the impossibility that the real entails, and which puts love to the test of its possible failure.”
The glass work with its intricate pipes, goblets and potion ingredients, neatly contains the parameters of Bordo’s work. Elements recur from her ongoing “Denise files” series—based on a mysterious semi-fictional character the artist has crafted out of found belongings. Witness the deck of cards, the allusion to correspondence, and hotels. Bordo presents information as deliveries in piecemeal fashion, in works that coax the viewer into the position of the hardboiled PI sifting across reams of fragmentary evidence while chasing after an elusive whodunnit. Ultimately, the procedure is meant to elicit in the viewer an intuition regarding the limits of what is presented to them, for that visible evidence conceals something that cannot be seen and is much more fundamental: desire, memory, longing, the space that joins and separates people; in sum, what it means to seek what she has called a relationship without images. (Text by Ignacio Adriasola).
