Ira Lombardía
Lecciones de geometría (Geometry Lessons)
Alarcón Criado, Seville, Spain
March 14, 2025 to May 16. 2025

Ira Lombardía's line of research has remained firmly in that direction we would today call post-photographic, but which transcends all categorization. Her methodology is based on the systematic questioning of hegemonic paradigms: those inherited from Enlightenment thought, European postmodernism and post-structuralism, which have permeated contemporary artistic practice until they have left it drained of life; but also of the more or less sophisticated political models of preserving established power, based on a Darwinian, capitalist, patriarchal, and pyramidal vision of society. These models translate into the exploitation of the land and the sea, of women and people belonging to the Global South, also identified as resources. First geometry lesson: the pyramid.

The second geometry lesson presented in this exhibition begins with the square, a form nonexistent in the natural world that represents the intellectual utopia of Eurocentric mathematical, philosophical, and ideological systems. With subtle irony, Lombardía associates this primary form in Western education ("draw a square") with the heightened masculinity of Minimalism, the quintessential postmodern art movement. Lombardía's artistic practice is based on research into archives, museums, libraries, documents, and primary sources, whose images she extracts, rethinks, recontextualizes, or redefines with strategies ranging from juxtaposition and assemblage to the generation of three-dimensional objects that can be considered sculptural and that increasingly approach architecture, constructing spaces that invite reflection.

For Lombardía, whose teaching work is inextricably linked to her artistic career, the circle is the geometric figure that symbolizes the space for the transmission and generation of knowledge. A form that evokes both the origin and infinity of life, and the cyclical nature of life, especially rooted in ancestral cultures and connected to female sociability (the dreaded Sabbath), Lombardía's circle also speaks to the need to break free from the logic of overproduction. The ecology of images, which Lombardía recycles, consciously renouncing photography, is associated in this work with traditional sustainable agroecosystems such as the milpa, a non-anthropocentric way of relating to the earth and its fertility. The fertility of the earth, in turn, is related to that of women and their possible self-management thanks to the contraceptive pill, patented in Mexico in 1951. Feminism, ecology, and motherhood are three essential themes in Lombardía's recent work.

- María Santoyo

Traces of Time

Cannery Village Gallery