Artists are people of few words. They apply their language to things that are difficult to verbalize, or of difficult meaning, always on the threshold of metaphors. They occupy an indispensable and often misunderstood space. Lovers of limits, artists have known how to find good stories for their works.  We are all on the other side of the other side. Núria Roselló has been carefully photographing aspects of reality for some time that, apparently, do not deserve aesthetic attention or those linked to beauty. Photography pushes everything away, and Roselló's exploration of limits has taken her to extreme territories—death, waste, ugliness, oblivion, rejection, repulsion—and there she has understood that they are all part of the same whole. And being on a limit often places us in front of a line where it is difficult to know which side we are on; or if any side is, after all, the same place.

Now, Núria Roselló presents some photographs linked to the idea of ​​conflict between rejection and absence. In short, between not wanting and not being. He does it in a disinterested way, in the sense that he does not want to explain why, but simply, directly and without artifice, show what. He had proposed it to us some time ago, in a project on waste titled Terrain Vague (2022). It questioned the meaning of the uselessness of abject objects and how the trash of trash is defined. Photographs of wonderful simplicity and a love for waste that are nothing, but could be everything; that configure real landscapes, that configure landscapes of the soul, everything is now and nothing, and we paraphrase Vinyoli and continue. 

In Catalèptic, garbage images go one step further and have become more sophisticated. It not only shows what is there but also what is not there. We move between the proximity of what is everyday and domestic and the abyss of the unknown and mysterious. Mystery is another key concept, actually, in all of Núria Roselló's photographs. The fine line that exists between one thing and another, between what you don't want and what you don't have, is what the photographer explores in this installation made from tintypes. The question he poses to us is not without a point of cruel irony: what we have we throw away and we remember/desire what we don't have. Here is desire, and it has capricious behaviors: they are its mechanisms, it is desire itself.

The rejection 

We are losing because we live. And everything can be lost, everything can be thrown away. Waste contains no doubt: it is waste. Things are thrown away voluntarily and piled up to be forgotten. An uncomfortable nature is taking shape, yet one of extraordinary deformed beauty. There is no beauty without imperfection. 

It is just about purifying, which means reducing, abandoning what you have had. Utensils and materials accumulate, creating strange associations and combinations that obey the laws that supervise the disorder of things. Doing an exercise of defiant resignation, they prepare not to disappear, aware that resisting is subsisting. They cling to a life on the margins, which transforms these materials into different, singular ones. It happens that sometimes the most important thing is hidden in the trash. And it may seem worthless. 

The absence 

Emptiness and nothingness are synonyms. What we don't have is part of this void. Whether because we have never possessed it or because we have lost it, absence generates exceptional actions and reactions.

We remember what we have lost and will never get back. Almost everything we know is the stuff of oblivion, which is why nature has rewarded us with memory. But memory needs names. Núria Roselló's tintypes give names and assign them an image. Photography allows you to tear off, delete, extract and make it disappear if necessary. We look at things that are here and that are not here. Sensory we perceive them, but they show what is absent. Curious, showing what is not there. That is why the ability to remember and memorize is so necessary, since it is exactly what generates the true image that Núria Roselló wants to be seen. 

We often associate absence with death. Núria Roselló also does it. In his work, death has always played a perhaps not very obvious but fundamental role. We know there is death because we know there is an end: nothing. Some images that seemed indestructible are gently disintegrated by the effect of absence. But there is only absence in the memory that we forget. No matter how sensitive you are, you will always find a trace, some breadcrumbs in the middle of the road, to remember, to just remember. The senses place everything in space and time. And, to begin with, sensation lives everywhere, only what is dead or seems dead remains orphaned of sensation. Núria Roselló leaves this trace by making the photographs not completely within time, in order to leave something for eternity. The images tell us: “We are not in the world, but we are here.”

The Catalèptic installation speaks of the need for mystery that moves creators and audiences, and perhaps all of life. Of beauty that anticipates ugliness. Of the fine lines between the limits. He talks about death as the only place to go. From distance. Of slowness: the eternal calls for calm. And silence. In everything there is a tendency towards silence, and in these scenes, even more so.  In silence, then, we leave the photographs behind to exist, as if in a state of catalepsy, perfectly aware that they are not alive, but not dead either. 

Anselm Ros 
Exhibition curator