“There are truths that can only be told in the form of a story.”
Ursula K. Le Guin. The Language of the Night
The exhibition “No me cuentes cuentos” (Don’t Tell Me Stories) by Estefanía Martín Sáenz brings together a collection of works that continue the line of research begun with Todo ocurrió aquí (It All Happened Here), a project presented at ArteSantander 2024. In this new proposal, the artist delves into the idea of how images and objects can contain and rewrite stories, revealing the symbolic meaning hidden beneath their everyday appearance.
The toile de Jouy print—found on textiles, ceramics, collages, and embroidery—becomes the common thread and starting point. Through her reinterpretation, Martín Sáenz creates a tension between decorative beauty and the implicit narrative, between the surface and what lies hidden beneath it. The repeated scenes of the toile, traditionally narrative and ornamental, are transformed here into territories open to ambiguity, to the overlapping of times and meanings.
The title No me cuentes cuentos (Don’t tell me stories) alludes to a distrust of single versions of history, proposing instead a fragmented view, where memory, manual gestures and evocation construct a new visual narrative. Each work functions as a fragment of this plural narrative, a space where the personal and the collective intertwine through materials laden with time and traces.
With this exhibition, Estefanía Martín Sáenz continues to delve into her own unique language that combines technical precision with conceptual subtlety, inviting viewers to reconsider the relationship between image, object and narrative.
