Exhibition | LABIRINTOS
March 14th to April 11th, 2025
Exhibition view..
SOLO EXHIBITION:
Maria Miguel von Hafe
TEXT:
Isabeli Santiago
a labyrinth can bebuilding
which is difficult to get out of
due to the large number of interlocking roomspart of a garden
where the streets are laid out in such a way as to make it difficult to get outcomplicated network
of interconnecting paths
Daedalus
intricate junction
of several things
confusion
tangle
tangle
imbroglio
Set of cavities
between the eardrum and the ear canal 1
*
Maria Miguel von Hafe's labyrinths are a space for thinking about thought itself. An interstitial place between inside and outside, almost utopiandream architectures, but where you can guess traces of the real. Screens the size of our faces, mirrors, rooms, windows? A chance to rethink ourrelationship with the world around us. Just as labyrinths, lato sensu, don't have an absolute definition or iconography, the artist's proposal remainsopen enough for the paths to be reinterpreted again and again. Please, enter.
As a representation, labyrinths appeared in Maria's life when she was still a child, through drawings made by her father, an architect. They weresmall graphic puzzles that challenged her to think with her hands and eyes. With her hands she would traverse the paper looking for the exit, hereyes fixed on the intricate paths drawn by her father, leaving her own trace.
Years later, recovering the latent family memory and also the choreography of the mind-eye-handflow, Maria composed a series of paintings that project themselves as a cartography of her own thinking, connecting the concerns she now faces as an adult artist. It's no longer about finding away out or repeating a route pre-defined by others. It's about walking to the center, paying due attention to the particularities of each alley. And giving them their own space.
With works that gather gesture, attention, containing clues to what precedes and surrounds them, von Hafe invites us to transcend beyond theframe. The domestic scale of the paintings, which locates the conditions of their production, also reveals their meditative intimacy and theirunfolding across color variations. The installation, on the other hand, invites architectural proximity and attentive, framed observation. The wallsseem to lose their imposing force, and the guiding planes are in front, to the side, on the floor. The labyrinth is amplified in the three-dimensionality of the exhibition room, where we are also on stage, only to be withdrawn again in a small graphic portal, on the scale of the palm of the hand.
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