Nuria López Blanco

About

Nuria López Blanco (b. 1999)

I work between image, sculpture and installation, in what I try to think of as the place or scene of the photograph. That place is often perceived as a freeze frame, an image that blurs or is ‘elusive’, that doesn’t quite translate — like speaking in a second language. Shop windows covered in mist are no longer hyper-visible, duty-free floors look like dance floors and floodlights can be blinding. I am attracted to that point where looking is almost an intrusive gesture.

My installations tend to work like film sets, where you can enter the scene and the objects are almost props: they don’t quite do what is expected of them. Barriers are more slippery, but not more effective; gym towels are not fully bleached by going through industrial laundry cycles; windows don’t allow full visibility because they are covered in soap. There is a certain aesthetic of error, of deception revealed: like sneaking in, noiselessly, and being discovered.

To generate these ‘scenes’ I generally appropriate gestures of maintenance, languages of interior design and the body that strives; I find a relationship between the control of surfaces and the control of bodies. But in my work, this control ends up reconfiguring other frameworks and possibilities, less triumphal, more affective and uncertain. Perhaps other ways of approaching images and objects are proposed, between rubbing and capturing.