work 2020

text by Bárbara Golubicki

Jessica Trosman's sculptures stem from a deep understanding of what it means to push boundaries until they are broken. With their dilation movement and their torsional force, her pieces evoke not only a dense network of artistic precedents anchored in pictorial informalism, but also a constructive language that, starting from textile elements, takes up practices marked by experimentation and the development of new techniques and materials. Driven by a strong impulse towards newness, the invention and innovation of fabrics or the creation of textures were part of a mental repertoire that is not content with accessing a finished product, but concentrates its energy at the service of an almost alchemical job, attentive to material processes.

In this sense, her artistic strategies are based on protocols that were born in this laboratory in which she transformed her workshop, but they suffer a distortion and deviation in their passage to volume. The preparation of fabrics, the choice of their brightness and their color, their fine-tuning for the temperature to which they will be exposed, is accompanied by dysfunctional pattern making. Jessica Trosman, inflates, deforms and freezes, enhancing the contingency andchance factors. The result is a series of singular sculptural object, capable of suggesting scenes charged with eroticism, violence or terror. Pieces that vary in scale and color, ranging from saturation to dirtier mixes, and that even incorporate oddities such as random images on the media.


In this way, it is possible to see that the passage to the spatial grammar of sculpture can be understood as a transit in which the continuity lines literally become entangled with breaking points. Remaining in the textile language, Jessica Trosman emancipates herself from the tyranny of the normative and conjectural body in order to jump to three-dimensionality. Her “monsters” (as she refers to her pieces) are devoid of the imperative of shape and, although they are the effect of an aesthetics that continues to balance DIY and industrial, they now embody memories, fears, sensations that seem to reverse the vectors of desire. The "monsters"; disfigure anatomy, but retain the human quality of presence, not only in the forceful way in which they occupy space, but also through their tactile dimension. By touching them, it is possible to experience the transformation of their brightness, from the rigidity and tightness of their appearance into a soft and smooth material, close to the body’s own fleshiness. These volumes retain their radiant splendor and a particular charisma: knotted, dented, unfolded, tangled, wrinkled; they hint a gesture of powerful ambivalence, of birth and of break-up, the remains of a process in which the construction of a universe is confused with the destruction of what came before.