Undervoice, the first anthological exhibition of the work of Mar Arza (Castelló de la Plana, 1976), displays works she created from 1997 to the present. As the artist also created seven pieces specifically for this exhibition, they are being shown here for the first time.

Mar Arza’s artistic career has evolved with subtle and meticulous yet forceful poetics, calling on us to ‘read intensely’. Thus, opposing the implicit arrogance inherent in any discourse, which invests the creator with authority, her projects ask us to regard and even remain attentive to that which withdraws and resists being perceived unequivocally.

Language, or rather, the rearguard of words, and how they contribute to dissent, plays a crucial role in the artist’s grammar. Engaged with the abstractions upholding every message, she is especially concerned with their strict materialities, from the meaning of a typeface to systems of image construction and the corporeality of a symbol.

The Colombian writer Juan Cárdenas identifies lightness as ‘a hallmark of great art, that which seems to float and avoids looking serious’. Indeed, we see lightness, meaning ideas freed from heavy doctrinaire solemnity, as foundational in much of Mar Arza’s works, even in those that unmask how the arts have historically represented, stigmatised and influenced the social place of women.

From there flow her insights about the politics of femininity developed as underground currents, her reinterpretation of rebellions that conspired against their successive hegemonies, which were woven in the fissures of memory, undetectable but firm, sometimes fragile and secret, always moving forward to point out what is ready to take flight and what is foundering.

Mar Arza’s entire oeuvre exists within a kind of epistemological blink that lets us glimpse the face and the tools of what is compelling and what deserves to be reconsidered and conveyed in a different way. And indeed, when certainty is hard to come by, when nihilism becomes a hollow ornament and especially when one must speak out, we need artists to turn perplexity into a manifesto and to link urgency with metaphor.

The great Peruvian poet Blanca Varela penned a few wonderful verses that speak of the rebelliousness unleashed when we unite our vulnerabilities. They read: ‘slowness is beauty / I copy these strange lines / I breathe / I accept the light / under the thin November air / under the colourless / grass / under the cracked / grey sky / I accept mourning and celebration.’