Hot Iron Marginalia

The art connoisseur resembles the detective who discovers the perpetrator of a crime (or the artist behind the painting) on the basis of evidence that is imperceptible to most people.

Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method

The intersecting stories that make up Hot Iron Marginalia by Adrià Julià refer to the reasoning by Carlo Ginzburg, who stated that it is through the observation of scattered signs and vestiges of evidence that one can understand how knowledge is coordinated and organised. In this sense, the artist seems to establish a methodology to read history against the grain through the detection and identification of a series of details that can be seen at a glance: the detachment of surfaces and particles, the recovery of inscriptions and graffiti, the recurrence of number 69, sports training or going up and down stairs, provide certain clues to read the political implications that lie beneath artistic exchanges and cultural displacements, in addition to their effect on the social landscape.

Julià uses a collection of photographs of Romanesque churches, the circulation and traffic of works, of the spectacularisation of conflict and landscape as a foundation to recover the marginal notes that allow us to analyse the coincidences and frictions between historical accounts and media narratives. The asymmetrical reflections that seem to be transferred from one piece to another throughout the exhibition provide certain clues to carry out a reversible reading of its parts and to re-interpret each one of its parts.

Magali Arriola
Art critic and independent curator