The Rabbit Fountain

Texture, montage and narration are the essential foundations on which Julia Santa-Olalla builds her poetics. The texture of her painting, thanks to the brushstroke that leaves the trace or hint of the act of painting on matter, introduces the tension between the pictorial nature of the image and its unequivocal photographic origin. The matter, by its unctuousness, traps us, retains us before a mechanically recorded instant that is resized precisely by its treatment from the painting. The montage operates in Santa-Olalla's group of works in order to amplify the narrative resonances of each of the pieces. The stopped time, the suspended action and the enigma contained in each work, as if they were photograms, are accentuated by a sequential arrangement that demands that we question and unravel a logic, the meaning of a possible narrative or the transparent thread that binds them together.