Relieves is part of a new body of work inspired by the carvings of religious altarpieces that generically recovers the visual language of the disappeared main altarpiece of the church of Santa Mònica. The forms allude to puppet controls, wooden skeletons used to manipulate string puppets, which in these pieces appear oversized, unused and flattened against the plan, as if they wanted to abandon their functionality to become an image.

In contrast to the manual carving, the reliefs have been sculpted with a robotic milling machine on a block of polyurethane, a process frequently used in industrial prototyping, and then covered with a very thin sheet of aluminium using a technique similar to traditional gilding. In this sense, the pieces draw on the historical link between puppets and religious images that is present in the origin of the word 'marionette', in reference to the Virgin Mary, who was frequently represented in 16th century French puppet shows.

The agnostic appropriation of this imaginary can be interpreted in itself as a gesture against the iconoclasm we inherited from conceptual art, but above all as a call for attention to the urgency of responding with images to a new visual regime. It is a reminder that, now more than ever, it is not only the machine that produces the image, but also the image that produces the machine.

2023

Production: Jose Carlos Romero, TMDC

Aknowledgements: Pilar Gálvez, Fernando Gómez, Oriol Pont, Litus Codina i Oscar Gallart de la Companyia de titelles Herta Frankel, Teresa Travieso del Taller de Marionetes Travi, Laura Cortés i l’associació de la Casa Taller Pepe Otal

Rubén Grilo (Lugo, 1981) lives in Berlin. He has exhibited at LoPati, Amposta (2022); CentroCentro, Madrid (2019); ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, in collaboration with Metaphysics VR (2018); Union Pacific, London (2016); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2015); Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz (2015); Kunstverein Hildesheim (2014); and CSS Bard, New York (2011), among others. Grilo received the Botín Foundation grant (2013) and has been resident at Gasworks, London (2015) and the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2011-2012). He is currently working on his first monograph, to be published by Pasarela.