Texture, editing and narration are the essential foundations on which Julia Santa Olalla builds her poetry. The texture of her painting, thanks to the brush stroke that leaves the mark or act of painting on the material, introduces the tension between the pictorial nature of the image and its unequivocal photographic origin. Due to its unctuousness, the material traps and holds us for a mechanically recorded moment that is resized precisely because of its treatment by the painting. Editing, a concept that we can also point to as elemental to film language, and not just in its expository articulation, serves in all of Julia Santa Olalla’s works to amplify the narrative echoes of each of the objects. The stopping of time, the suspension of action and the enigma of each work, as though they were still frames, are accentuated by that sequential arrangement, like a film that challenges us to question and unveil the logic, the meaning of a possible narrative, or the thread that weaves them together.

The exhibition catalogue features an essay by Juan Francisco Rueda.