Plantarvm

"Fragmented Wholeness" 

Group show in Mucciaccia Gallery 

curated bu LATAMesa

29th of March - 19th of April 2025

London Uk

The fragment, as theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot have explored, holds a paradoxical quality: it speaks to incompleteness yet gestures towards an imagined totality. It emergesas an oneiric construction—fleeting yet resonant—like the glimpse of an idea just before it is fully grasped. In this sense, the artists of Fragmented Wholeness— Iris Garagnoux, Rita Fernández, andAlessandra Risi— offer windows into their personal and intimate landscapes. A fragment is never merely an isolated part—it is a portal to the whole, to the unconscious, to memory, to history, and to the body as a site of creation. These fragments stand as passages, liminal spaces between the impulses, images, and memories embedded in our physical and psychic being. In psychoanalytic theory the unconscious is often conceived as a vast, elusive terrain—brimming with latent desires, memories, and symbolic echoes. Set as a store of meaning that cannot be fully articulated, but it continuously strives for expression. It remains forever beyond our full grasp, enacting a tension between fragment and totality. What is articulated is always partial—a fragment that gestures towards a larger, ineffable whole. It is within this liminal tension that the artists operate, allowing it to unfold as a site of multiplicity, resistance, and potential.

Working at the threshold of painting, the artists explore the fragment as both a rupture and a portal. Tiled painterly diary entries, sensory traces of bodily organs, and splintered landscapes become expressions of displacement and remembrance. Inspired by the Talavera de la Reina tiles in her family home in Mexico, Rita Fernández reimagines these domestic elements as painterly, intimate diary entries for her series Azulejos (2024-25). Using small, square stretched canvases, she builds exhaustive layers of priming, paint, and varnish to imitate the glossy surface of ceramic tiles, creating a deceptive materiality — a deliberate play on objecthood that ultimately reveals its true nature when viewed from the sides. Tiles encapsulate autobiographical references and domestic scenes from both Mexico and London. These intimate fragments map a tender yet complex storyline shaped by Fernández’s experiences on migrating — a meditation on longing, and displacement. Through this visual language, she evokes an imaginarium of memories and images: moments that drift between reality and reverie, where home exists as both a physical space and an emotional landscape. Each tile emerges as an autonomous fragment and container of visual, poetic, and material meaning yet remains inextricably linked to a larger storyline. The repetition of motifs evokes the recursive nature of memory, where recollections are never fully intact but instead pieced together through iterations of thought and image. Each tile becomes a fragment that resists closure while containing the possibility of endless reinterpretation.

Iris Garagnoux creates layered transparencies that echo the body’s plasticity and porous boundaries, revealing states of flux, dissolution, and reformation. Her approach evokes Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs, which dismantles the body’s hierarchical organisation in favour of a dynamic, fluid conception—one that resists stratification and predetermined functions. Painting on the floor, she builds a repertoire of instinctive gestures informed by her background in gymnastics. Her abstract brushstrokes swirl across the surface, evoking the visceral rhythms of pulsing organs—movements that exist between control and surrender. Through layering organic and synthetic materials, Garagnoux conjures a haptic, sensorial presence that seems, at times, to push beyond the frame itself. The interplay of paint, latex, and fabric subtly recalls the clinical translucence of an X-ray, opening windows into the body’s hidden landscapes. She approaches the canvas as a fragment, a window, a fleeting glimpse of something larger.

Recurring motifs such as the placenta and umbilical cord as seen in Cordon à vif .1 (Amnion series, 2024) and Decidua (Amnion series, 2024), evoke themes of origin, nourishment, and interconnectedness,

marking a primal threshold between self and other. They underscore the body’s dual role as both vessel and conduit for life, while also alluding to memory, vulnerability, and cyclical renewal. Meanwhile, the subtle presence of the tongue in Lèche collée (Language series, 2025) with its connection to taste and language, adds yet another layer to Garagnoux’s evocative visual lexicon—an intimate exploration of sensation and expression.

Alessandra Risi explores landscapes as sites of memory and colonial narratives, where the fragment functions as both a wound and a window—a rupture that reveals the layered histories embedded in landscapes. Drawing from her Peruvian heritage and engaging with archives of botanical books, stamps, and scientific research, Risi’s work creates a hybrid space where history and nature converge.

Her representations of flora and recurrent wildfires suggest a world in perpetual change and dislocation, bearing witness to cultural memory and increasing volatile environmental shifts. Through expressive brushwork, Risi crafts vivid, bold, and immersive spaces where past, present, and speculative futures intertwine. The materiality of her work coexists with an oniric, surreal sensibility. Her paintings speak to a geography that is at once local and mythic, where emotions and histories reveal themselves through colour, vegetation, and figures suspended in a space that feels elusive — uncanny, blurred, and yet specific. Disintegrating and fluid forms conjure landscapes suspended in tension, caught between forces of erasure and preservation. Within this shifting terrain, the fragment becomes a means of navigating the instability of histories, identities, and the land itself. 

Through their varied approaches, Fernández, Garagnoux, and Risi present a mode of inquiry that resists closure, invites reflection, and confronts the impossibility of totality. In Fragmented Wholeness, the fragment becomes a proposition—an exploration of what is absent yet still present, incomplete yet profoundly whole. These ruptures give rise to new meanings: fleeting, unstable, and luminous in their refusal to settle.

Text by LATAMesa.

Pilar Seivane & Carolina Orlando.