I bought flowers for myself'

The transitional object and ornament are the focus of attention in I bought flowers for myself. An ex profeso project by the artist Nora Aurrekoetxea for the Galería Juan Silió, which is her first solo exhibition in Spain. Through elements such as rings and flowers, she experiments with the relationship between objects and affections (emotions or attachments).

The transitional object is the one on which human beings transfer their feelings in moments of change, initiating a relationship with it and endowing it with functions from the field of the imagination, even in adulthood, to comfort and provide security. Similarly, in her artistic practice, Nora recognises elements that reappear, that accompany her. Sometimes as questions to be resolved, other times as elements that give her security and move between projects.

Ornament is presented as a contradiction and discrepant element in the idea of pleasure. An aesthetic debate that starts in the 19th century - Pugin, William Morris or Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe or Robert Venturi; and which leads the artist to ask herself whether ornament is not something structural and vice versa. Is pleasure dispensable? If we admit the capacity of ornament to transmit symbols and represent a reality to which there is no access, she wonders if it is not time to question the opposition "structure - ornament" and look for their relationships. An ornamental structure, and a structural ornament.

These theoretical approaches take shape in space, starting with the ring as an ancestral object. The small, the personal, which, removed from the body and placed in space, allows us to focus on the formal. The bouquet of flowers, however, materialises the occupation of the void. I bought flowers for myself also reverses the idea of offering as something external, and becomes an offering, a tribute to oneself.

The exhibition is accompanied by the text Las flores fueron en algún momento flores, pero ahora son trozos, pedazos, masas by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, curator and art critic based in London. In addition, a publication is published that collects WhatsApp conversations of five performers around the idea of flowers and the place they occupy in erotic and affective relationships.