Around four years ago, artist Irene Grau told me that the dimensions of her Color Fields — the monochrome boards that she transported and photographed amidst nature — had two limitations: the length of the load of her van and the maximum width she was able to carry under her arm, between the palm of her hand and her armpit. Let’s imagine for a moment that the size of many of the landscapes created in a specific historical period was determined only by a limitation contained in the title of this project.

All this is perhaps just a fantasy, yet it embraces a need to move the picture out of the studio and an implication regarding its size. The work thus becomes portable, but by extending the studio and removing the architectural barriers that had previously determined its size, its geographical displacement now becomes another obstacle, and over time, this direct contact with nature will end up expanding the work to the point of making it inapprehensible, until it actually merges into the landscape itself.

Beneath the Arm: Between the Palm of the Hand and the Armpit draws us to the limits that have historically determined the work of artists. It is a starting point that, despite initially focusing on physical boundaries, transcends them and strives to reflect the relationship between creators and their closest circles. Such positions can be traced back to the art of Antiquity, and in our age have led to exercises of intrinsic importance that nonetheless imply a necessary beginning to articulate this proposal. The works in this exhibition proposal address the issue of the loss of power before different situations that aspire to either transcend the human scale or be reduced to it, yielding to this dimension that includes all those processes that tell our story and portray us.

The ideas and their formalisation, the materials employed and the metamorphosis to which all the works appear to be subjected transform the exhibition installation into a mutable space, devoid of drama, that has turned into a long-standing investigation. Over and above the forces in each work, this investigation can be read as an attempt to bequeath something as simple as this: the ability to understand art in relation to the physical space conjured up by the exhibition title, and the possibility of everything being contained in this space.