PRESENTATION: Leonor Serrano Rivas-Here Be Dragons

Despite being deeply rooted in scholarly research, the work of Leonor Serrano Rivas appears imbued by interpretation and free association; concatenating one thought after the other with a non-logical reading of things and themes. Hence, Dream logic is often used by the artist as a way to present layered sensorial environments where the viewer must forget the narrative impulse.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Carlier|Gebauer Archive

In the exhibition “Here Be Dragons” by Leonor Serrano Rivas,we are first met by a whirlpool of material bodies that both flush us into the bowels of earth and heed us under the moonlight sky. These bodies lure us into their stream, like summoners of ancient magic, and following the curved mirror screen at the heart of the gallery, we enter their tempest. A large photographic film, the exhibition’s eponymous centrepiece, dresses the inside of the curve. Exposure to the sun has etched spectral compositions of flowers and leaves onto its surface. The analogue process of layering 16mm black and white film with organic material has allowed chemical residues and a touch of unexpected color to impregnate the film, as if the convergence of nature’s particles and photographic technology form a new performative alliance. On view in an adjacent space, the 16mm film is turned into a panoramic motion picture that similar to a lizard’s tail curls around us, silently caressing us with its chromatic skin. In her first exhibition in Berlin, Serrano Rivas presents four bodies of works that take their beginning in the natural world, among the life of plants. They soon reveal themselves as the muses of earth history and the carriers of the non-heroic stories of humans and nonhumans. They engage the ongoing inquiries of Serrano Rivas, in which she explores the inherent theatricality of the ways we coexist and produce knowledge. In her work, she interlaces a multitude of scientific, historic, and literary sources, among others, and in this exhibition in particular, the thoughts of Donna Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, Emanuele Coccia and the Mundus Subterraneus by Renaissance polymath Athanasius Kircher. Here, Serrano Rivas’ works plot out like the sites on one of Kircher’s magia naturalis maps, a bag of stars, steering us to uncharted territories and the waters of livable futures. Inside the photographic coil in the middle of the gallery, a cabinet forest of metal structures holds the mutated figures of crops and plants. These hybrid blooms, “Where We Expect to Find Flowers” (2025), are covered in coats of crystals, which were deposited in a chemical reaction with vegetable acids in an electrolytic bath. On elongated wires, they waver quietly like performers in waiting or, underwater volcanoes in sudden moments of elegant rupture. Joined on an ocean floor, a sea of earth, they form pockets of stories, gathered like plant seeds bound to sow new worlds. The exhibition’s watercourse further settles in the gallery’s periphery in three looming jacquard tapestries. Their motifs are translated stills from the video work “Breathings of the Moon” (2022) by Serrano Rivas and artist collaborator Diego Delas, in which the artists recreated an underwater world by means of magnets, the sediments of colorful particles, and an artificial seabed. In its woven renditions, “Patrones de ritmo” (2024–), the overlapping of wefts, the alteration of the threaded order, and the open knots of the jacquard technique mimic the rhythmic patterns of water’s breathing of flood and ebb, like the movement of fluids within the body. For Serrano Rivas, giving agency to water shows the flow between the world’s micro and macro levels and translating between mediums introduce new images and new energies. On the outer rim of the gallery, sculptures of wood and glass respire. These “Carcasses” (2019–) are both fluid and gritted, dancers of breath, compasses of air that, like tangled bodies, move inside the other. Forged by the classic elements of fire, air, water and earth, they are the wombs of our imagination. They carry us and our connections, these small ancient creatures, and become both the lungs that breathe across the gallery space and the instruments that calibrate us towards a new cosmos.

Photo: Leonor Serrano Rivas, Tables of the Moon, 2022, From the series “Magia Natural”, Set of 4 elements, weavings, variable dimensions, © Leonor Serrano Rivas, Courtesy the artist and carlier|gebauer  Gallery

Info: carlier|gebauer  Gallery, Markgrafenstraße 67, Berlin,  Germany, Duration: 2/5-21/6/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.carliergebauer.com/