ART CITIES: Brussels-Martina Quesada
Martina Quesada’s practice traverses sculpture, installation, and video, employing pared-down geometric systems to interrogate the unstable boundary between visibility and invisibility, as well as the transitional zones in which transformation is registered. Her approach disarticulates functionalist or instrumental perspectives, privileging instead perceptual displacement and the production of conditions in which new modalities of attention and remembrance may arise.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Bernier/Eliades Gallery Archive
Anchored in material presence yet resistant to hermeneutic closure, Martina Quesada’s work occupies a liminal space at the intersection of geometry, spirituality, and phenomenology. Rather than constructing narrative, her practice adheres to an internal logic that recalls the self-regulating systems of Minimalism, but with a sensibility oriented toward the atmospheric and the affective. Pigments appear to breathe, surfaces oscillate between opacity and resonance, and forms gesture toward the sacred without recourse to iconography or doctrinal signification. In this sense, her work functions less as representation than as what Jean-Luc Nancy might call a resonant presence—an articulation of form that generates meaning through relational intensity rather than symbolic content. Quesada’s exhibitions are conceived not as accumulations of discrete works but as coherent, interdependent ecologies. Installation operates as a mode of thinking as much as of display: fragments are repeated, sequences ritualized, and spatial relations choreographed to heighten the viewer’s awareness of both interval and continuity. In these environments, curatorial strategy and artistic gesture converge, producing what could be described as a “sensitive architecture” in which the material and the conceptual are mutually reinforcing. Her recent exhibition “If This Is a Space” extends these concerns through a series of wall sculptures and works on paper configured as a system of interrelated forms. The body of work enacts a visual synthesis that eschews narrative structures while adhering to an inner coherence, realized through repetition, variation, and spatial sequencing. Here, rhythm emerges not as decorative pattern but as structural principle—an ordering that recalls serial strategies in post-minimal art while maintaining an emphasis on perceptual openness.Across media, Quesada engages with dialectics central to modern and contemporary aesthetic discourse: material presence versus symbolic suggestion, disclosure versus withholding, objecthood versus relationality. Geometric configurations are never presented as closed forms but rather as propositions—structures that remain contingent, subject to the shifting gaze of the viewer. The application of pigment on paper introduces an atmospheric register, extending the sculptural into the pictorial and invoking what Merleau-Ponty described as the “visible invisible,” a dimension of perception that exceeds representation. In this light, Quesada’s work does not simply occupy space but activates it, transforming the exhibition site into a field of resonance in which meaning is not prescribed but emerges through embodied encounter. The works resist interpretive foreclosure, instead establishing conditions of potentiality—an aesthetic of openness that invites, but does not dictate, the formation of meaning.
Photo: Martina Quesada, The borders are fragile II, 2023, Marble dust, pigment, gesso wood and linen, 142 x 217 x 4 cm, Photo: Piloto Pardo, © Martina Quesada, Courtesy the artist and Bernier/Eliades Gallery
Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 46 Rue Du Châtelain, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 4/9-25/10/2025, Days & Hours: Thu (4/9) 17:00-21:00, Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://bernier-eliades.com/
