El Cultural de El Mundo
1-7 February 2007. ARTE. Pag.31. Javier Hontoria
Press article published on the occasion of the individual exhibition titled Entre pecho y espalda.11 January-17 February 2007. Formato Cómodo gallery.
«RUBIO INFANTE, FROM THE TEAR
In the still short trajectory of Paula Rubio Infante there is a series of constants that are fully defined in this exhibition that now presents in the also young gallery Format Comfortable and that constitutes its best work to date. Disquieting scenes of veiled violence, strategies that affect the sensory or the agitations and narrative (and formal) arrhythmias are the axes that form the backbone of a project that brings together here drawing, painting, photography, installation and video. Rubio Infante (Madrid, 1977) emerged in the shelter of the extinct gallery Ka. In one of those groups I remember a work by Rubio Infante consisting of a false wall on whose back a generous amount of fresh fish was hidden. His progressive putrefaction and the smell that gave off gave shape and meaning to the piece.
More matured, accurate and consistent, Between chest and back is also, although not as radical as then, an attack on the complacent observation of art, founded from a traditional prism, in this case through two elements, the wing chair and the galgos with whom the artist builds her plot. If the former refers to deviant symptoms related, according to the artist, to a certain bourgeois conformism, the latter refer to hunting as a stale and rancid tradition. The centerpiece of the exhibition is one of these tattered armchairs. Two large-format photographs showing famished greyhounds lean-literally-on it. The images are disturbing and the assembly, sharp and sharp.
An implicit violence and the aroma of the sinister, accentuated in the paintings and drawings of small format that show exhausted greyhounds and that are mixed, significantly, with photographs of prisoners of Abu Ghraib, summarize this set of works that closes with a very enlightening double video projection In one of them, greyhounds appear abandoned to their fate, useless for hunters. To the rhythm of Sighs of Spain they wait, nervous, the end. They are images that speak of insensibility and indifference within the framework of a retrograde tradition. The other projection shows some upholsterers carefully disassembling the armchair until leaving it in its skeleton, very close, also, of its end.»
