Fátima Moreno (Granada, 1980) presents her first solo exhibition in Galería Ehrhardt Flórez, with the title Lengua salada (Salty Tongue).

The exhibition extends over three rooms and, with the exception of an oil on canvas and a work on wood, is composed of drawings on paper made between 2015 and 2024. Not always following chronological order, the arrangement of the works presents a discontinuous narrative gaze in which the different groups, organised according to punctuation signs, exclamations, question marks, tones and rhythms, give new meaning to the artist’s world. Drawing, and more recently a more pictorial type of drawing, through materials, surfaces and supports, has been an escape route for Moreno, a kind of exorcism, a catharsis and a liberation. And at the same time it is also manual exercise and representation.

Many of the works now hanging on the walls of the gallery, belonging to different periods, and which originated in sketchbooks that she has filled up over recent years with quick, fleeting drawings, comprise not just a very personal imaginary world, but also a language intrinsic to her life. From those particular circumstances, Fátima Moreno carried out the artistic practice of drawing as pure necessity. For her, drawing is an embodiment of the physical sensations that evoke a body in transformation, or already transformed, mixed up, shrunken or twisted. And that internal, bodily twisting is alleviated by drawing that materialises the sensation. Many of her works respond to the notion of drawing as a practice of internal transformation. Not just intellectual, but physical. Literally physical. But it is also true that not all her drawings are transcendental manifestations, but sometimes merely observations that, through humour, propose a point of view in relation to a fact, an action or an isolated event.

At the same time, and veering away from the subject, that destruction of the subject that Bataille talked about with reference to Manet, or impressionism and modern painting in general (which lacked any subject at all according to Bataille), Moreno’s work spreads like a fluctuating, floating, ephemeral experience of life. In that sense, through a practice that precisely captures that experience, we find something of the origins of modernity in her work; some characters, rather than stemming from an imagery of Andalucia or Granada that is very characteristic of and present in her work, have a Frenchified feel. Some lines are more typical of a Daumier-style aesthetic of caricature, while some compositions, where the form occupies the entire surface, recall works such as the famous portrait of Jeanne Duval painted by Édouard Manet. Some of Moreno’s drawings, in which pain and anguish are sometimes prominent, have a decadent air that in no way lessens their vitalistic and optimistic visions. It is thus a modern decadence, the kind that somehow aspires to scandalise the bourgeois and combines images of the sublime and the diabolical, the elevated and the crude, the ideal (figures that fly, that disappear, that are others) and agonising boredom (the tedium of settled life with a hand that paints, that thinks, that reasons). The works are full of satire and social criticism and incorporate utopian visions of other possible lives, as well as more domestic scenes that represent observations of rather more insignificant and anecdotal passages of life.

In each and every one of the drawings, whether more abstract or more figurative, more diluted or representative, we find a strong sense of a very characteristic gesture. It is biting and stark, and on a formal level it is executed with exquisite nuances and very subtle lines. The faces, the expressions, the shapes and postures of the bodies, the large hands, the twisted women – lying with parted legs – are over-the-top but realistic and, removed from any kind of projection, put forward a very clear, direct notion of the subjects and characters they represent. Colour is also used as a tool of feeling and with it, the artist constructs atmospheres and scenes with varying degrees of emotion. Apart from the Frenchified air, it is worth highlighting a certain Lorca-esque quality rooted in an Andalusian voice and folklore that pervade the tone and spirit of the drawings. And here, more than a language, we might even talk of a pronunciation: it is not the subject itself but the tone with which it is approached. Perhaps this is where the authenticity of a method, a style and a distinctive voice are to be found, reinterpreting a long tradition of culture and knowledge. In Fátima Moreno’s fluid drawing, we could find infinite references, some of them entirely accidental and others indicative of an incessant and conscious search into the nature and history of drawing. Thus, it simultaneously encompasses the folklore of the papers of García Lorca and the elegance of the sketches that Carlos Alcolea brought together in his fascinating book Aprender a nadar (Learning to swim).

In short, Lengua Salada blends distinct worlds that travel a common course. While at first, the body of work seems to be more of an accumulation, with something of a playful tone, it soon reveals itself to be, rather than a general murmur, a series of individual voices that appeal to the most profound and sincere aspects of humanity.