Eulalia Valldosera’s art consists of light and shadow. Light becomes a metaphor for her efforts to establish her own identity; and shadow suggests how often her searches end in obscurity. In this way her work resembles that of other artists of her generation who mine an inner expressive terrain, such as Alicia Martín Villanueva, Bogoña Montalbán, Angela Nordenstedt, and Patricia Ecario.

The fascination of Valldosera’s work derives from the disjunction between her anxious search for knowledge and the uncertain results she obtains, something that exposes the futility of pursuing art as a means to knowledge. While she continually returns to the same themes, her work operates in multiple registers, and she often uses metaphor to suggest resonant relationships. Teràpies, incidents, fuites (fragment: l’hamaca) [Therapies, incidents escapes (fragment: the hammock), 1991], for example—a hammock riddled with holes—is a descriptive and disquieting piece that suggests a plethora of bodily orifices, much as Robert Gober’s sink drains do.

Although since 1990 Valldosera’s work has focused on the body, she has become increasingly involved with the absence of light as a metaphor for her own perplexity. Of her most recent works involving shadows, a piece dedicated to the idea of motherhood, El menjador: la figura de la mare (The dining room: the figure of the mother, 1994-95), is especially memorable. In this installation, a shadowy female figure is enlarged to gigantic proportions on a luminous curtain, creating a sense of looming danger. Then, the spectator passes through the curtain and discovers the shadow’s source—a small, plastic bottle placed on the floor. Here, as elsewhere, light obscures rather than illuminates.

—Pablo Llorca

Translated from the Spanish by Vincent Martin.