Marta De La Fuente

A Ritual of One's Own

Opening: Friday, July 11th · 7 PM to 11 PM

On view until September 9th

Marta de la Fuente offers a precise and empathetic look at a contemporary search for meaning. She uses tarot not as a mystical object, but as a symbolic structure that reveals a shared human need: to understand oneself and the world. Through a series of works that function as records of this practice, the artist explores card reading as an emotional, narrative, and performative space where desires, identities, and possible futures are projected.

Far from treating tarot as a predictive mechanism, here it is observed in its deeper function: as a tool for interpretation and social ritual. It's a symbolic mirror where the tarot reader, the card, or the scene gives words and images to what we sometimes can't articulate. It's also a place where the urgency to recognize oneself in something—a calming sign, a story that restores some control, or guidance—is expressed without filters. The artworks capture that instant when someone, out of their own need, grasps onto a narrative (real or imagined) and chooses to believe.

There's something raw, even uncomfortable, in how we surrender to these practices. An intense vulnerability manifests in gazes, exaggerated gestures, tense smiles, and anticipated sighs. These moments are portrayed without dramatization: an honest, sometimes satirical perspective that neither judges nor softens. It simply shows us as we are: human, fragile, vulnerable.

The exhibition also proposes a mutable reading: the pieces can be rotated, rearranged, and reshuffled. As in tarot, meaning lies in the relationship between elements, not in each isolated element. This random and combinatorial logic challenges the traditional exhibition format, suggesting that everything can hold meaning, if one wishes to find it.

The exhibition invites us to observe it as a collective language—one that blends aesthetics, anxiety, a desire for control, and a need for connection. It encourages us to look from a more complex perspective: that of someone who recognizes the beauty and honesty in wanting to know.

There's a generational dimension to all of this. It contrasts current forms of ritual with inherited ones: her grandmother, raised in a Christian framework, uses the rosary and prayer. Facing this "enemy" practice, she cleanses the cards, purifies them, changes their meaning. And with that, she constructs her own narrative of security.

Her own ritual.

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