Artist: Melania Toma

Integument serves as a natural continuation of Toma’s earlier exhibition this year Porous Bodies. Using the mural Pelle as her starting point, Toma dives into the ‘skin’ aspect as a threshold. Pelle thus becomes the primary link between the two shows, one as continuation of the other and inextricable from the same.

Where Porous Bodies is concerned with permeability and the leakings, seepings and ejections of the body, Integument opens the portal towards a journey into the skin, where the body is reimagined as an entity of protection.

The work Peace Paloma (or the Underneath) is Toma’s pictorial depiction of the current social and political environment the world is subject to. It is a visceral and ritualistic landscape where a bird-like figure soars above the chaos and emerges both as a strong force and a symbol of peace, honoring the inner life – deepest layer – of everything surrounding. A smaller-scale painting titled Flare shows another type of creature that energetically flies, personifying the constant telluric movement beneath the surface of each human and the world as a whole. In Toma’s words “it is a nervous system revolt, a peaceful overstimulation.” The intimate and dreamlike painting Sentinel (or Night Garden) displays a nocturnal scene, filled with depictions of life at its most cellular, bacterial level, becoming an almost botanical work where Toma’s endless unearthing of connections between the human body and nature is evident. It is a work that embodies endless cycles, it mourns at the same time it honors, it is fertile at the time it shows decay and it projects regeneration as an inadvertent moment of unhealing. Sentinel (or Night Garden) serves an ancestral presence, strongly connected to the Skinkeeper cowhide painting, where both of these works portray guardians that hold close the stories their skins tell through scars, etchings, textures and movements. Skinkeeper on its part is the first of its kind in Toma’s range of work. It is crafted and created from a discarded object (cowhide) that proved an extremely uncomfortable and problematic medium for the artist. In it, one can admire in its engraving a tree-of-life figure, a certain kind of map that encompasses Toma’s research of the merging between multilayered planes, and how her work holds open the infinite gateways into an ecosystemical world.

Integument challenges the static notion of a protective membrane as a simple veil through its lively, vulnerable and porous depictions where one can find that a shield can also be a site of transformation, rupture, creation and intimacy. The refuge is present throughout these works as Toma makes spectators question whether the opening of the skin – a wound – could lead to a haven of self-preservation. Can we, through vulnerability, openness, tenderness, find this sacred space and would this wound be a portal that enhances our capacity of transformation and protection.