SOLO EXHIBITION “VELAR Y APUNTALAR”

           Emilia Martín Fierro 


Mundo Arte Gallery, in collaboration with the Centro Cultural Español de Miami (CCEMiami) 

Opening: September 10 · 6:00 p.m.        |  Closing: September 30

Mundo Arte Gallery presents Velar y apuntalar, a solo exhibition by Emilia Martín Fierro. The works in this series are being shown publicly for the first time on the occasion of the exhibition. The project grew out of a 2025 research fellowship undertaken by the artist at the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection, as part of a collaboration between the University of La Laguna and the University of Miami.

The title brings together two complementary actions. In Spanish, velar means to veil or safeguard, but also to keep vigil in the face of absence. Apuntalar evokes the provisional shoring up of a threatened structure. In these works, both operations are material and symbolic: the images neither reveal themselves completely nor disappear; instead, they remain suspended in a state of fragile exposure.

The recent works gathered in the exhibition are built from strata of painting and photography laid over superimposed fabrics and organza. Transparencies, folds, and reflections generate fragments and blurred flashes. Light passes through the layers, turning each surface into a sustained structure in which image, archive, and memory remain active, though incomplete.

RESEARCH, MEMORY, AND MATERIAL

The exhibition is sponsored by the Centro Cultural Español de Miami (CCEMiami), whose support makes the project’s public presentation possible and advances the cultural exchange at the heart of the show. Here, the exhibition space becomes a place of encounter and attentive listening—one capable of opening questions about fragility, care, and what a community chooses to preserve.

Velar y apuntalar does not attempt to close or reconstruct the narrative encountered in the archive. Instead, it renders visible the effort required to sustain that narrative without reducing it. The paintings accompany the image in its condition as documentary ruin, allowing light, superimposition, and material to articulate other relations to memory. What is missing is not completed: it is acknowledged and cared for.

Martín Fierro places the viewer before images that resist immediate interpretation. Moving between the intimate and the historical, the body and the territory, the series asks us to accept that every act of seeing is partial. Veiling thus becomes a form of attention; shoring up, a discreet act of resistance.

PRACTICE AND CONTINUITY

 

Emilia Martín Fierro (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, 1965) is a visual artist and professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of La Laguna. She studied at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp and at the University of La Laguna, where she earned her doctorate in 2003. Her practice brings together painting, installation, photography, textile art, and archival inquiry, and has been presented in Spain and the United States.

At Mundo Arte Gallery, Velar y apuntalar affirms art as a space of active memory. The exhibition calls for attention both to what is made visible and to what must be protected in order to continue to exist.

MUNDO ARTE GALLERY  ·  EMILIA MARTÍN FIERRO  ·  VELAR Y APUNTALAR