Room. Syntax – Iris Sanmartín, Lisa Braid, Antonia Nannt, Natalia Gil, Elene Melikidze, Rita Paisana, Erik Merisalu, Walter Yu

To be in order to inhabit. In Room. Syntax the artists propose various actions, inviting us to approach and look closely or to look into the distance that evokes the inner, reflective and symbolic world.

“Believe in order to see,” writes Cervantes, “thinking that whoever believes in nothing, even looking, achieves nothing.”

The Room is filled with gestures and silences that go beyond material patterns, where the dreamlike plays a transcendent role that breaks with the syntax of the narrative.

The works inhabit the space; they are not merely present, they fill and occupy it. Looking at them allows us to read their expression and understand the text. Opening our eyes and doors, capturing the light, the essence of what is displayed, that fleeting instant that animates art, a time still yet dynamic, tense yet poetic, the point and counterpoint of emotion.

The Room comes to life, things happen, stories are told that suggest a latent world, in which an indefinite time weaves with warm materials a hidden reality that is revealed when contemplating the works; the story is mysterious and its syntax ambiguous.

What is seen, what is imagined, matter, reality, everything is diffuse but concrete, the key that opens and closes the Room in which art dwells.

In Iris Sanmartín's works, emptiness becomes a pause and a suspended nostalgia; an expanded time where something seems about to happen. Elene Melikidze introduces a disquieting vibration, the sensation of invisible forces that inhabit the silence and gaze back at the viewer. In contrast to this tension, Rita Paisana proposes a luminous refuge, a vibrant calm where light and matter construct a subtle intimacy.

Lisa Braid situates the Room in an almost imperceptible pause, the space between two words, where stillness and movement coexist. Natalia Gil's textiles shift the Room toward an open emotional horizon, where anxiety and desire coexist and time is felt as memory or promise. With Antonia Nannt, the structure ceases to be understood solely as form and becomes a malleable space, where experience matters more than use.

If until now the Room was a place of pause and stillness, with Walter Yu it becomes a form of representation. His images seem like frames from a larger story, charged with atmosphere and a tension that never quite resolves.

As a material and symbolic key, Erik Merisalu presents a key, an everyday object that, within the Room, becomes a sign of opening and closing.

Each artist transforms the Room in their own way. Their works don't define it: they expand it, stretch it, make it permeable. The Room is no longer just a place, but an experience that unfolds between what we see and what we imagine.

Texts developed from the reflections of the artists themselves.

Participating artists

The exhibition brings together works that reflect on the idea of the "room" as an interior space and a place of experience. Each artist approaches this theme from their own unique perspective, generating different ways of understanding and representing that space. The project stems from an interest in considering how we inhabit spaces—physical, emotional, or imagined—and what stories, tensions, and memories are constructed within them.

Iris Sanmartín Dalmau, Elene Melikidze, Rita Paisana, Lisa Braid, Natalia Gil, Antonia Nannt, Walter Yu and Erik Merisalu.