Max Estrella presents Leyla Cárdenas’ second solo exhibition at the gallery. The interpretation of a world built by and for the image is becoming increasingly complex, amidst a visual overdose. Within this context, the Colombian artist chooses to treat photographic images as objects in her projects. These photographs, emulsified on textile, become specters in constant mutation, unstable and structurally destabilized.
The threads of her unweaved textiles carry the reverse of the image: reflection or representation becomes impossible. The viewer pauses before fragments of lines and particles that are part of a longer story. A story that folds and unfolds, moving back and forth, colliding with the direction of meaning, just like palindromic words.
The exhibition consists of a series of installations that unravel the established order of the photographic panel and propose possible deconstructions in how we view the world today.
This project was born from the artist’s residency in Mallorca in 2024, where she explored the distinct geological origins of the Balearic Islands.
The artist draws a connection between the planet’s geological evolution and Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, where in both cases, time is not a linear actor.
Upon entering the gallery, we are met by two works that reflect the earth’s bifurcation in the Artà caves of Mallorca. Here, Cárdenas begins her play between warp and weft, unweaving and adding volume. These geological sites record the passage of time in space, an obsession shared by both geologists and the artist.
Next, we are transported to the quarry from which humans extract the stone that will eventually become the structures we inhabit. In this case, the beautiful Pedreres de s’Hostal in Menorca becomes both origin and end. Several installations are based on images of this magical, mysterious place. One of them, ‘Eternal Return’, a site-specific work, embraces and envelops one of the gallery’s openings, turning a dilapidated beam into the prow of a structure in perpetual tension.
In the main gallery, the artist adds more pieces to the puzzle, titling the V-shaped image of the quarry ‘The Origin of the World’, referencing Courbet’s censored 19th-century painting. Here, a double textile without a visible weave invites the viewer to move around it to observe the marés stone and the traces of human exploitation. This grid marks the origin of the blocks that will form future constructions.
The result is a collective drawing, a collective sculpture carved onto an imposing rock.
In the same room, we find the large installation ‘Palimpsestic Weave of Bellver’, composed from photographs taken by Cárdenas of the stone walls of Bellver Castle, a landmark of Mallorca.
These stone walls are far from silent, they are filled with inscriptions and carvings dating back to the castle’s origins in the 13th century. From the stonemasons’ signatures to contemporary graffiti, the palimpsest coexists with the lichens that nature attaches, asserting its co-authorship in this vast living mural. The installation is supported by aged props, a reminder of the transience of our existence.
The room concludes with ‘Multiple Futures’, a corner installation connecting the viewer to the artist’s Colombian origins. This work is based on an abandoned iron mine, a material once seen as a symbol of progress in Cundinamarca. A black-and-white diagonal photograph reveals the negative of the image.
As we move toward the back of the gallery, we encounter ‘Reversing the Unweave’, a variation on the Menorcan quarry where tension is divided into fragments, mirroring the way stone separates from the quarry face. Here, some pieces are rewoven into others.
The project room houses the installation ‘River Fiction’, in which a textile stretches horizontally across the space, bearing the image of a dry river that sketches and sculpts the terrain.
Finally, at the back, the video ‘River Thread’ (flint makes the Colmenar sing) shows an image tracing the flow of the dry river across a stone screen from Colmenar de Oreja, a town near Madrid and the source of much local architecture.
The exhibition closes, as if looping back on itself, with ‘Forking Horizon’, a mirrored sea that duplicates the landscape like a Borgesian palindrome.