I boought flowers for myself '

The transitional object and the ornament are the focus of attention in I bought flowers for myself. A project by the artist Nora Aurrekoetxea specifically for the Juan Silió Gallery, which constitutes her first solo exhibition in Spain. Through elements such as rings and flowers, she experiments with the relationship between objects and affects (emotions or attachments).

The transitional object is one on which human beings transfer their feelings in times of change, initiating a relationship with it and providing it with functions from the field of imagination, even in adulthood, to comfort and provide security. Similarly, in her artistic practice, Nora recognizes elements that reappear, that accompany her. Sometimes as issues to be resolved, other times as elements that provide security and move between projects.

Ornament is presented as a contradiction and a dissenting element in the idea of ​​pleasure. An aesthetic debate that dates back to the 19th century - Pugin, William Morris or Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe or Robert Venturi - and which leads the artist to consider whether ornament is not something structural and vice versa. Is pleasure dispensable? If we admit the capacity of ornament to transmit symbols and represent a reality to which there is no access, the question arises as to whether it is not time to question the opposition "structure - ornament" and look for their relationships. An ornamental structure, and a structural ornament.

These theoretical approaches take shape in space, starting from the ring as an ancestral object. The small, the personal, which, removed from the body and situated in space, allows us to focus on the formal. The bouquet of flowers, however, materialises the occupation of the void. I bought flowers for myself also reverses the idea of ​​offering as something external, and becomes an offering, a tribute to oneself.

The exhibition is accompanied by the text Flowers were once flowers, but now they are pieces, chunks, masses by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, a curator and art critic based in London. In addition, a publication is published that collects WhatsApp conversations between five performers around the idea of ​​flowers and the place they occupy in erotic and emotional relationships.