At Acéfala Gallery in Buenos Aires, Lena Becerra presents COAGVLA, a sculptural installation of glass, stainless steel and silicone that holds matter in the liminal state between dissolution and recomposition.
The title comes from the alchemical principle solve et coagula: dissolve and recombine. Lena Becerra takes this not as metaphor but as method. In COAGVLA, matter is literally broken apart, suspended in glass and silicone, and reassembled into forms that do not resolve cleanly into either the organic or the industrial. What you see across the gallery walls at Acéfala are objects that could be organs, or machines, or something the language of either category doesn't reach.
The wall-mounted pieces combine blown glass, white with craquelure-like black lines that recall cracked porcelain or neural mapping, with stainless steel brackets cast to look like antler tines or root systems. The glass sits in the bracket the way a preserved specimen sits in a display mount: held, not attached. Below the mounting point, the steel branches fork and drag, some pieces extending nearly the length of a forearm. The posture is somewhere between medical and devotional, and the ambiguity is the work's central proposition.
Other pieces expand toward rounder, more overtly organic forms: a large silicone oval mounted flat against the wall, its surface worked into a texture that recalls compressed lung tissue or the skin of something preserved. Stainless steel forks pierce its edges. On stainless steel mounting panels with the finish of old watchcases, clusters of glazed ceramic nodules emerge, mottled yellow-green or soft pink, erupting from what reads as a matrix of dark oxidized metal. These appear less like sculpture than like specimens: something observed, classified, framed for attention.
Becerra draws the work's conceptual framework from Jung's accounts of alchemical transformation and from the question of what happens when decomposition is interrupted, when matter is denied its return to cycle. "What happens when decomposition is interrupted, when matter is denied its cyclical return?" she asks. The pieces inhabit this suspended interval: not alive, not dead, not complete, not dissolved. Folds, wrinkles and rhizomatic transparencies appear across silicone and glass surfaces, describing something held mid-process.
The installation ran February 26 through April 17, 2026 at Acéfala Gallery. Viewed as a whole, COAGVLA reads as a kind of inventory of the body at the point where it stops being body, a collection of forms caught in the moment that biology stops and something else, not yet named, begins.
