Anto Lloveras’s Between Quotation Marks (2012) performs a delicate yet conceptually potent intervention into the aesthetics of subjectivity and the politics of visibility by transforming the act of quoting into a spatial and sculptural operation installed within the walls of his live-in gallery in Madrid, where soft black quotation marks—three-dimensional commas—hover beside the heads of participating guests, silently framing their presence as both utterance and citation; this gesture, both playful and solemn, constructs a syntax of social sculpture that echoes Beuys’s “Soziale Plastik” yet departs from its collective heroism by privileging quiet relationality, affective presence and the domestic as a site of artistic inquiry, foregrounding a form of social interaction that eschews spectacle in favour of proximity and co-presence; the wall itself, marked by years of creative labour, becomes an active memory surface, a palimpsest that holds the traces of drawings, conversations and shared time, converting the private sphere into a mutable archive where the bodies of invited artists, poets and musicians become fleeting inscriptions within a sculptural framework that oscillates between documentation and autonomous art, as captured by Juan Barte’s contemplative photographs; these portraits—each sitter subtly framed by the hovering marks, their gaze off-centre, their identity bracketed—expose how subjectivity is always already mediated, quoting itself through layers of social, linguistic and affective codes, while the installation refuses to claim their image as object, instead generating a contract grounded in hospitality, friendship and consent that resists appropriation; rather than monumentalise or dramatise, the work whispers its critique through minimal means—soft forms, intimate scale, provisional arrangements—and in doing so, articulates a sculptural ethics of representation where quotation becomes care, framing becomes exposure, and every act of seeing entails a silent negotiation between subject and viewer, making Between Quotation Marks not merely a portrait series but a sculptural proposition on the conditions under which community, memory and authorship may become visible without being enclosed or consumed –
.Lloveras, A. 2012. Entre comillas: social sculpture. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2012/03/entre-comillas-social-sculpture-2012.html
