Linarejos Moreno Photography

Tejiendo los Restos del Naufragio/ Weaving the Remains of the Shipwreck

In this exhibition, Linarejos Moreno presents a series of pieces which she has come to call “Tejiendo los Restos del Naufragio” (Weaving the Remains of the Shipwreck). In these pieces, a series of large format prints on burlap and memory-laden objects come together to become sculptural objects that speak of absence.

The energy and narrative power of time mingles in these pieces with an imaginary interior space. This space, in turn, seeks to carry the meaning of the social, or the collective. A symbolic system charged with the industrial, the mechanical, and the mathematical, turns to this space again and again. It is not for nothing that Linarejos grew up among industrial ships and factories that closed and transformed over time as Spain suffered economic changes. Perhaps this is the source of her longing for memory.

The function of these photography-based sculptures is not only documentary. Instead, Linarejos also creates new meanings from the objects and documents involved. The video “Arqueología Industrial Ficticia” (Fictitious Industrial Archeology), created in 1998 and present in this exhibition, gives spectators the key to understanding how she works. In the manner of a playful archeologist, the artist entertains herself constructing false histories on the basis of the industrial photographs she has encountered.

In the pieces collected in “Weaving the Remains of the Shipwreck”, the large-format impressions on hand-crafted burlap transform the photographic image into one among many sculptural-pictorial materials, disrupting the line between image and object. These sculptures also have another element in common, the thread. Linarejos uses this thread – a sculptural expression of the line – to construct perspectives, intersections, an entire architectonic universe with which to build upon “remains,” in the manner of a reverse Romanticism.

Her work continues to construct and build from the basis of destruction, like an instinct to survival. This exercise gives her work an immense strength, a way to “inhabit” territories forbidden to her by time and economic cycles.

This is a powerful language in which the boundaries between photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, fiction, and reality are left completely obscured.

Linarejos Moreno was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1974. In 1996 she graduated from the Conservation and Restoration of the National Heritage and Cultural Assets School (E.S.C.R.B.C). She earned her BA in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) in 1998. She finished her Masters in Technologies Digitales in Photography and Video at UCM in 1999, and received her ABD in Fine Arts from the UCM in 2000. She completed her training in Paris working in the department of photography and graphic design in the architecture agency Zen+DCO from 2000-02. In 2005, Moreno received the ABC Painting and Photography Prize, and in 2008, she was awarded the Purificación García Prize for Contemporary Photography. She has had solo-exhibitions in Madrid at Sala Amadis, Vacio 9 Gallery, and Casa de Velázquez. She also exhibited in PHOTOESPANA’09 in Madrid and the Contemporary Art Bienal Rafael Boti in Córdoba, in 2010.