Kinetic Syntax brings together a set of practices that explore the relationship between gesture, sign, matter, and system, placing itself in a shared territory between drawing, writing, sculpture, and visual notation. Through a variety of media—painting, drawing, ceramics, textiles, or installation—the works in the exhibition investigate how forms can operate as units of meaning: marks, symbols, or diagrams that, when articulated with one another, produce a kind of spatial syntax.
The exhibition begins from a semiotic intention: the images, lines, and structures found in these works are not presented solely as abstract forms, but as open signs—capable of being read, deciphered, or projected by each viewer. Some refer to contemporary systems of signage—the
schematic clarity of urban wayfinding, diagrams, or technical design—while others evoke more ancient registers: archaic scripts, ritual patterns, symbols that seem to come from remote cultures or from collective memories that are difficult to locate with precision. Between these two
polarities—ancestral and everyday, ritual and functional—a field of resonances is established in which a sign can recall both a lost writing system and a traffic signal.
In this context, the boundary between art and writing becomes especially porous. The repetition of the stroke, the accumulation of signs, and the organization of textual or graphic fragments generate structures that oscillate between reading and contemplation, between cognitive and bodily experience. The works thus function as open archives, where thought, memory, and gesture are inscribed on surfaces that invite you to be traversed rather than decoded in a strictly linear way.
Text: Ignacio Uriarte