In tailoring, the first fitting (Primera prueba) is the moment when the suit meets the body for the first time. It is not yet finished: seams are open, edges loose, pins still visible. The aim is not to display it, but to test whether the idea fits reality, whether the form can hold movement, whether the fabric follows the body or resists it.
This space was once a tailor’s shop. My mother was a tailor too.
As a child, I watched how each garment passed through that fragile moment when everything could still change. She sewed in silence, with the focus of someone who knows that a single stitch can alter an entire structure.
I return to that gesture of measuring, adjusting, and trying again, not only as homage, but as a method. I work from the same logic: never assuming anything is final, understanding process itself as a form of listening.
Primera Prueba is both an expiation and a collective exploration. I use my own work as part of the structure that holds the others: an imperfect base against which we measure ourselves. Each artist moves through their own language, yet we share that same point of uncertainty where it’s still unclear whether the suit will fit.
Pixy Liao begins from the body as an intimate, staged territory; her irony opens a space between play and identity. Jan H. Erichsen works through impulse and destruction, turning the domestic into a physical act of release. Álvaro Gil builds through matter and balance, as if each piece were a seam held in tension. Jordi Ribes paints from fiction and disguise, seeking in the image a reflection that always shifts. And I move among them, trying to adjust the distance, to find a shared measure, to stitch our differences together.
There are no hierarchies or certainties here. The exhibition unfolds as a quiet conversation made of affinities and contradictions: a space where what doesn’t yet fit also makes sense.
As in a first fitting, what matters is not that everything is correct, but that something begins to take shape. There—between doubt, error, and trust—is where the work becomes real.
—Oscar Florit