Hidrante is pleased to present Estudios de Erosión: La Piedra Vulnerable, a group exhibition with works by Steve Maldonado Silvestrini, Javier Orfón, Estefanía Rivera Cortés, and Enrique Rivera Príncipe.

Estudios de Erosión: La Piedra Vulnerable considers erosion an agent of change, implying movement, transportation, and the impossibility of the eternal in the natural world. The vulnerable stone is a contradiction, as a subject at once everlasting and surrounded by insurmountable enemies that move, weather, flake, and rub it, changing it and making it new. So, too, is the possibility for us as human subjects, a capacity to change and be affected, to be transported and sedimented as a complex aggregate of experiences. The works in this exhibition point towards the possibility of vulnerability in the most rigid subjects and the necessity to be open to the inevitable processes of erosion that life subjects us to.

Enrique Rivera Principe's tightly executed paintings meld natural figurations and figures in the landscape. His atemporal monochromatic nocturnes are composed of precisely rendered landscapes rendered in black paint above luminous white grounds, with glowing starfields alighting the tightly composed foregrounds constructed through exact marks and washes on the negative space. In Inabón, 2023, a human figure formed from the same starry sky as above perches on a rock, with the currents and water of the Río Inabón swirling below in contrast with the serene composition of boulders, trees, and grass that surrounds it.

Javier Orfón's Cueva de la Ternura, 2021, is a tender anthropomorphized cave, its arms reaching out as if seeking an embrace from the audience. A pair of ears and a trail of smooth stones lead up to it, suggesting the cavern actively listens to its surroundings. At the same time, a group of rocks and assorted bones underneath the table is a calcic connection to real life and the underground structures. This miniature space-within-a-space recalls the sacral attractive aspect of caverns.

Estefanía Rivera Cortés’ drawing is a loose sketch of a cave interior with figures of friends interspersed within the composition. 21/12/23, 2023, is a drawing made on a December 23rd expedition with the Guano Crew, an anarch speleological group of artists and fellow travelers active since 2020. The drawing formally subverts its subject matter, the negative white space, scratchy lines, and imprints of charcoal on the gray newsprint delining and filling in while suggesting human figures and activity amongst the rocky cave walls and structures.

Steve Maldonado Silvestrini's paintings are an index of erosive forces. They function as abstract records of energies and materials exerted on them: water from a flooded body of water, silt as soil transported by the water, rain which caused the flood and dotted the canvas in the intervening days, and the sun which dried out and layered the marks. Lluvia 2 and Río parte 1 track the flow of Earth's energy through their intervention on the canvas' surface.