Victoria Encinas. Ludic Unconscious

The Fernando Pradilla Gallery is proud to present our fourth solo exhibition of the artist Victoria Encinas (Madrid, 1962). For this specific occasion, under the title of Ludic Unconscious, Encinas is presenting a selection of sculptural and painterly works produced within the last two years.

Encinas is an artist who embodies a style of creativity quintessentially linked to the Madrid artscene in the ‘80s and ‘90s, decades during which the artistic movements both absorbed and responded to those international developments which, from the ‘70s onwards, fostered what came to be termed by Rosalind Krauss as “the dematerialization of the idea of art,” thus opening up the way for new practices such as performance, conceptual art, and movements such as Antiform.

Encinas’ trajectory cannot be separated from her interventions as a curator of independent artist spaces such as the Poisson Soluble and Garage Pemasa.

The title of the exhibition makes obvious allusion to Krauss’s concept “Optical Unconscious.” From an intimate perspective, Victoria explains that “Ludic Unconscious alludes to an inalienable creative impulse, to the vital force, the biophilia, the psychic capacities of regeneration, to the way the internal sense of artistic language comes to light, beyond the rational, the logical, and the conscious.”

The concept of the exhibition is yet another step in the plastic-linguistic evolution of this author. The artworks, equally abstract as they are hyper-concrete, distill the clarity of her language over flat surfaces and hard edges, without spoiling her dynamic or her poetic principles.

The genres of painting, sculpture, and drawing are recurring obsessions in her work, with distinct formal lines connecting them seamlessly: free geometry against a biomorphic organicity. Chromatic associations of a rather expressive profile against rather subtle tonal treatments. Empty and flexible volumes against orthogonal structures. An expressive personal range within a subjectivity exempt of theatricality or drama.

The elision of the signifier, the signified, but also the archetypal or symbolic latency, show that, for this artist, to be stranded in a kind of communicational “nothingness” is, in fact, artistic freedom in the most musical meaning of the term. Themeless. Her position always centers around visual language as argument, around the visual logic/illogic and the plastic reason/unreason in the most classic avantgardist sense.

Victoria Encinas uses materials that have a kinship with the concept of their language. The acrylic of “inexpressionist” textures in painting allow her to act along neutral and contemporary modulations, without the pictorialist melancholy latent in the shopworn devices of abstraction, and without falling in the technical effectisms of novelty art.

In her sculptures she has always made use of textiles, such as plastics, resins, polyester, objects and other supports. In this exhibition, the only visible material is dyed leather over concealed wooden structures, which convey the flexibility and nobility of the materials to the form of sculptures arranged along the concept of Antiform, through which Encinas articulates her particular method of geometrical and organic fragmentation and assembly.

In the paper works, the silk inks and the delineated cuttings across her collage-drawings afford a clarity, and a chromatic neatness, in line with the sensibility of her paintings.

Victoria Encinas was formed in the Faculty of Fine Arts and the School of Applied Arts of Madrid. She completed her studies after subsequent residences in Rome, Florence, and Milan as a fellow of the Design Center of the Ministry of Industry and Energy. She was awarded the Saga International Center Grant in Copenhagen, where she completed her international education. Her work is represented in various public and private collections such as the Collection of the Community of Madrid, the CajaMadrid Foundation, the Mariano Yera Collection and the Crown Prince of Dubai Collection.

Since 2019, the Queen Sofía National Museum Art Centre owns the archive of the independent space Poisson Soluble, which Encinas founded and directed in the 1980s. In 2023, it is exhibited in an activation-exhibition. The archive, donated by the artist to the institution, can be accessed at the Queen Sofia Museum.