Mónica Cabo observes normality. Not just any normality, but rather that which is based on a dangerous idea. The artist is suspicious of how we code, group together and value life. Hers and everybody else’s. A systematic paradox with which we approach reality, always peering into it to reduce any form of uncertainty, labelling our desires, behaviours and routines. A group of hermetic compartments favoured by a set design the artist finds as problematic as decisive and attractive for the activation of art.

Her works reach her spectators. They draw them into a subversive game, forcing them to face their conflicts removed from the coherence of their experience in the world, leading to new disturbances. The specific project for the MARCO proposes a thesis structured around issues that overlapped in previous projects (integrating experiences related to politics, society, leisure, sex and identity), but which now require interpretation from a complementary viewpoint.

There Will Be a Sea Battle Tomorrow takes its title from a proposition by Aristotle about the future: "there will be a sea battle tomorrow/there won’t be a sea battle tomorrow”, from which the artist creates a suggestive landscape around the idea of possibility. Thus, illusion again finds its way into her work as a concept, but this time closer to fatality. The Annex drowns in need but nothing in it is necessary. The space comprises four pieces existing in an eventuality that acts outside, against and from each object. The sculpture, a bicycle absorbed in its specular duplicity; the video with the scene of a dryer hanging from its cable, batting from side to side when it is turned on; the scaffolding, installed on small wooden pedestals, is used as a structure to hang a backcloth.

Four works that create an accidental present that rebukes the future. Will the future really happen? The answer seems painfully distant, abstract in circumstantial isolation of the representations; hitting the illogical body of the bicycle, the repetition of the unpredictable dryer, the eroticism of the backcloth, the inactivity of the scaffolding in order to trigger a series of associations in confrontation. Disturbing, imperfect, symbolically black, ironic with the space itself. The story is assimilated from certainty and simulation, perhaps understood as a metaphor of the system of art. And of the artist herself, self-portrayed in the disturbing video titled Self portrait (2013); transposing her own body hanging by a thread, at risk. 

The exhibition alternates moments of dynamism and stillness that put the public in a state of anxiety and surprise regarding the anomalous/unknown, with the instability and tension of an action that does not exist beyond the gesture in which it takes place: as happens with sex, gender, an argument, the creative act. It measures structures that are ambiguous and unpredictable. Pieces that add humour to everyday situations, which are tested and represented to reveal the connection between distant worlds, in which the gender issue remains the backdrop as a political metaphor for any practice generated outside the line marked as “normal”.

This exhibition at MARCO will be her sixth solo exhibition. In the first one, Ridy tu pley (Sala Alterarte, 2006) Mónica Cabo made a statement of intent, warning that she was ready to play. Fortunately, since then she has not stopped. She has contributed in an exceptional way to developing an active, renovated discourse in visual arts from the perspective of gender, borrowing the symbols and procedures of the queer theory. Located from and opposite what is in the margin, on the edges of what has been legitimated, of what is good and homogeneous. The uniqueness and talent of her work is evident in this exhibition.

Chus Martínez Domínguez