Before something becomes familiar, there is a moment when a material escapes definition. 

It is no longer simply functional, yet it has not fully become an image. It lingers somewhere in between, inviting closer attention. 

Ni mudo ni vacío, Ulrik López Medel’s solo exhibition at General Expenses, explores this threshold through a diverse body of sculptural and material works. 

Working across assemblage, casting, collage, papier-mâché and metal embossing, López Medel approaches each material as a site of possibility. Rather than arriving at a single visual language, the exhibition unfolds through distinct gestures connected by a shared attentiveness to transformation, memory and the subtle ways meaning accumulates over time. 

Months after the carnival has concluded, glitter once again smears the hand that emerges from a pocket. It is a stubborn presence that reminds us of the vitality of the falsely banal. Sometimes it is difficult to find beauty in the traces of the used, but an anodyne or residual appearance can disguise an unexpected power. Glitter is the indicator of an event: something happened there, like a force that simultaneously breaks into life and makes it possible.

The Yoruba understand the potency that lives within this contradiction between form and agency, and they invoke it through their ààlè: assemblages of different materials that inhabit the boundary of what we call an “object.” An ààlè can be stuffed with scraps, leaves, rags, sticks, and waste; it can sit atop a woodpile, hide in a thicket, or be tied to the branch of a tree. Although its separate elements seem devoid of a concrete function, when integrated into the ààlè, they become a talisman that protects its creator from death, theft, or misfortune. In turn, these assemblages warn of the ruin that may come to those who dare defy their power.

Like the ààlè, the glitter that keeps appearing in pockets represents that deep tension between presence and potency, silently welcoming the multiple forces that give life to our world. Every day, a host of similar manifestations pass before our eyes without us being able to read them: the residual spectrum of glue from a poster, or the silhouette of a faded sticker whose shape is legible only to some. Ulrik understands this phenomenon well, and therefore, his work addresses the hidden potency of material gestures on our horizon, which, like an ààlè, are a clear sign of an event, a force, or a desire: a cluster of palm seeds is submerged in wax and transformed into an opulent artifact; the textured pattern of a food grater finds its way into an intricate head representing consciousness (Ori) in the Yoruba cosmogony; and a paper sculpture, which seems related to an elegant Japanese akari, keeps the secret of the recent relief of a public transport driver.

The material gestures of Ulrik López Medel embody powerful intuitions that play with the inadvertent semantics of matter to invoke a furtive and complex thought. The exhibition Neither Mute Nor Empty is an encounter with Ulrik’s intimate methodology, which begins by identifying the “ghosts of use” that persist in the forms around us and that give life to our experience. As rarely happens, this exhibition does not gather a series or a body of work that resembles one another; on the contrary, it is a constellation of objects that rehearse diverse material strategies grounding Ulrik’s artistic work: assemblage, copying, casting, collage, cartonería (papercraft), watercolor painting, or metal embossing. These strategies, whose kinship is not evident at first glance, are simultaneously playful, formal, and conceptual, connecting the furtive potency of matter with an artistic thought that is both a personal history and an attitude toward the world.

—David Ayala-Alfonso.