“I am the monster that speaks to you, the monster that you yourselves have created with your discourse and your practices […]”, this is what the philosopher, art curator and writer Paul B. Preciado addressed the 3,500 psychoanalysts gathered on the occasion of the international conference of the School of the Freudian Cause in Paris, last November 17th, 2019. Paul B., trans and non-binary body, is an international reference of queer theory and gender studies. Can the monster speak? (2020) is the title that gives name to their latest book and, via monstrous appropriation and with profound admiration, to the first group exhibition organized by our gallery: Yo soy el monstruo que os habla.

Monsters, honorable mutants, birds of ill omen — We inhabit the world outside the norm, sliding along sinuous paths that affirm our presence, rooted in strangeness and darkness. In the end, a monster is nothing more than a reflection of our own condition. And as such, it is here to stay.

María Zárraga Únicas y Colgadas (2021) creates a strange symbiosis between mystery and demonstration: from photography and sculpture she presents us with a pair of marbled boots that perhaps belonged to a monster-woman or an electric woman, or a “freak” one. In La Despedida (2019), Javier Pérez recovers the inner monster, that of the territory of mourning and transmutation; we encounter the artist with gloved hands that more than touching insinuate another skin and make and unmake themselves in a goodbye embrace. With Ouroboros en el menú (2015-2016), Natuka Honrubia returns to the first monster: the one that devours everything, the one that expels everything in an endless cycle; each stroke of colored pencil is an imprint and so are thousands that make up the drawing. Lemos + Lehmann distills the room with By Heart (2021), a memory exercise about the past year that points precisely to the difficulty of remembering and the desire to do it more and without hesitation, trying to shed light on uncertainty: ink on paper is now white paper on ink. Finally, Masks (2019) by cyriaco lopes terri witek takes us to the origin of everything: a shapeless mass is broken, rolled, wet, slid, almost swallowed… transformed one and a thousand times into a face on the face.