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Review Dec 10 2009 « | »
Mixtilinea at Josh Lilley Belén Rodriguez González's solo show at Josh Lilley gallery

Flo Wales Bonner

When I think of a timeline I think of a chart, a diagram demarcating events that have been plucked from the tide of history and frozen, fixed into place like flags. The timeline makes time static, reducing experience to dead little grave markers. Belen Rodriguez Gonzalez's Timeline is something different. A toy train makes its quiet way around tracks laid out on the whitewashed floor of the Josh Lilley Gallery. As it travels (taking footage of a city of cut-out photographs that depict 24 hours in the artist's life, fixed in a loop around the room's edge), time is movement.

The stillness of the photographs - depicting, in varying degrees of focus, everything from ochre sunlight falling onto the artist's dinner table to books lined up like soldiers on shelves in a public library - is counteracted by the steady journey of the train, which projects its ghostly recordings onto a wall a few steps away. This live incarnation of images of the past blurs lines - not only those between the photographs which, on film, merge into one soft mess of shapes and colours - but lines between then and now, lines that mark experiences as distinct entities.

The line, rather than a frozen geometric form, is figured by Rodriguez Gonzalez as something alive and changing. In Grids sheets of lined paper, symbols of the bleak functionality of modern living, are replicated as individual meshes of fabric through which each spidery blue line has been painstakingly stitched in cotton. The artist's hand does the machine's work; what should have been dead and fixed instead has a tender, organic element of vitality. These blank pages suddenly tell a story, a subjective story of movement and labour that is figured in the trembling passage in time of hand and needle over fabric.

CPO3 is an industrial photocopier around which a taut network of fine cotton threads is stretched like a loom. The hard functionality of the machine, itself designed to replicate lines, is again challenged by an inquisitive human hand that weaves delicately breakable strands of experience through space and time, matching inanimacy with intention, blankness with movement and colour.

Rodriguez Gonzalez's work, as the exhibition's title suggests, pulls against one definite notion of linearity. Instead, like the infinitely vulnerable stitches that stretch through her flimsy rectangles of fabric, experience is imagined as a convergence of multiple threads, each at once unique and part of an indistinct whole.

Mixtilinea is running at Josh Lilley gallery on 44-46 Riding House Street, London, until the 20th January. For more information see the Josh Lilley Gallery website

Andrew Cattanach

Technology is by its very nature banal. It is present in everything we do and yet is designed to go more or less unseen. If technology becomes apparent it is normally defective. We get angry if instead of simply pressing a button we have to negotiate a faulty printer or defragment a sickly hard drive; we abhor checking the oil in our cars or mending jippy cisterns. Few of us really know what to do when things go array.

At the bottom of the stairs of Belén Rodriguez González's Mixtilinea at Josh Lilley Gallery, a large model train set - complete with train - fills the first space. Sadly at the time of my visit this was suffering a technical glitch and was not working.

Around the edge of the track are photos of various domestic and urban spaces that, when filmed from a camera on the train and projected on the upstairs shop front and a wall downstairs, replay scenes that witness the artist's daily life. The track is laid out in a rather conventional rectangle, undermining the childish nature of the work. A tunnel has been built from card to recreate the time she is asleep.

In the adjacent space there is a wall of individual sheets of lined paper. They're in fact not paper at all and the lines are crudely stitched into pieces of off-white fabric, the holes along their left-hand margin uneven. It's not clear how these are meant to function. They seem to want to question the nature of the original but are unlikely to fool anyone.

In the final space is a photocopier that is partially wrapped in blue and red thread. On pressing the copy button it grinds into action as if the threads are part of its ancient mechanisms. After a few seconds it coughs out a sheet of A5 paper perfectly striated with thin blue lines and one single red line for a margin. It's a replica of a note book page printed using a photocopier and coloured thread - adorably convoluted and beautifully banal it evokes high schools and punishment exercises. What is more, it is about technology and all its progressive absurdities.

In this piece González proves herself a thoughtful and poetic artist. What you are left with, the photocopy, is an attractive thing to look at. It has the warmness of something hand made. It is thoughtful. That this work came out of a prolonged period of research into the nature of the note-book page is an exciting thought and reminds me of the irrationality of photo-realism.

It's a pity about the train. But that's the risk you take when working with technology.

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