Resting Matter

In The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), a minor classic of horror cinema, a hand makes its way through an Italian villa: it moves among books, on a piano keyboard, along the corridors. It belongs to a tyrannical pianist who has died after falling down a staircase, shortly after signing a suspicious will. His secretary tries to contain it, locks it away, and eventually hurls it into the fire. It is not enough. The hand drags itself through the flames and ends up strangling him. Only at the ending is its origin revealed, bound up with guilt and imagination.

Garth Evans (Cheshire, 1934) saw this film as a child, and ever since, the image of a hand acting of its own accord has haunted him as a persistent idea. Over time, that intuition found its place within his work. In the studio, hands cut, fold, hold; they move forward before the form becomes clear. One makes first and understands afterward. This lag has sometimes been described as a form of knowledge that passes through the body before finding words. Sculpture then emerges as an open process, in which matter and gesture organize themselves in real time.

In his work, the body is always present. It appears as weight, as equilibrium, as the memory of a posture or a contact. In drawings, clay-worked papers, and small ceramics, the forms unfold with an internal logic that recalls the organic — between folds and cavities. Each element seems to respond to a physical experience, to the sensation of possessing a body and inhabiting it with a certain fragility.

In the work of Iván Estrada (Guadalajara, 1989), the relationship with the hand begins elsewhere. He grew up among mechanical workshops, blacksmithing, and jewelry making. Metal, heat, and resistance are part of an early apprenticeship that carries over into his practice. In the aluminum wall works, welding replaces drawing; the stroke is burned, oxidized, fixed as a direct record of the gesture. In his sculptures, tubes and structures bend and shift, generating paths that link together and veer off. Forms arise from a continuous negotiation between the force of the material and that of the body. That contact extends through time. Each intervention leaves a mark that accumulates pressure and rhythm. The artist’s body enters in relation with matter through actions that build the piece from within, where scale, weight, and resistance ultimately define its form.

In both cases, matter is a point of encounter. The gesture remains inscribed, and the body recognizes itself in what it has made. The works preserve that relationship: a form that still holds within it the movement that produced it. They are sustained in that moment when the making ceases and the form appears. And within them, still, the hand remains present.

—Text by Enrique Giner