Vivarium: Alicia Martín López

We must learn to inhabit waiting. To protect questions from the need for an answer. To persist does not mean remaining still, but to surrender to movement without asking where it leads. To touch objects, air, time; to approach things slowly, allowing their mysteries to unfold. To recover a form of attention that existed before the need to understand: to walk with the certainty that something invisible accompanies us, to play believing that universes exist.

To leave a foot print is not to mark an ending.

Do things ever come to an end?

They simply happen.

They continue to persist.

Matter transforms. Form changes. What cannot take shape gives way to what insists on remaining. Existence thus unfolds as a continuous process of transformation: making and unmaking, appearing and disappearing, persisting and letting go.

Vivarium emerges from a state of suspension: a space where forms seem to inhabit a system whose rules we can sense, but never fully comprehend. Painting builds this system through relationships, repetitions, and deviations, keeping the image suspended between the recognisable and the strange. It is a space for that which cannot yet be named, because it is still becoming.

Text by Victoria Ulloa

Alicia Martín López invites us to look without seeking to possess. Her painting does not represent the world; it gestures toward the idea of one. It does not emerge solely from what is seen, but from what is lived through. Its lack of definition is not absence. Faced with that which has not yet finished taking shape, Lyotard’s question, posed before all determination, resonates: Does it happen? Vivarium opens the door to a place where we still do not know what is being born or what is disappearing. Where matter decomposes only to reorganise itself. Where one form ends to make room for another. Where the body transforms without ceasing to be a body.