The skin twists, folds upon itself, seeking to break the limit that contains it. A latent desire: to be looked at, touched, transformed. It seduces us in its non-being, in its state of (im)possibility, in that “not yet” that pulses like stardust, yearning for its implosion.

Matter stirs, it rebels. It claims its sovereignty, its right to exist and not exist, to be and not be, all at once.

The impulse, beyond the gesture.

Can something alien to us inhabit the world without us being there to contain it? Can desire exist without a body to house it?

Alina Melnikova created for this exhibition a series of pieces titled Cosmic Corals. Twisted and perforated structures that could evoke natural elements but arise from the very gesture of working with matter. Like in an alchemical process, the ceramic here appears as a body in transit: it breathes, folds, erodes, and transforms. Here, form is not fully fixed, but mutable and fragmented. Melnikova places us before a world where the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the living and the inert dissolve. Like in Deleuzian becoming, the pieces settle in perpetual movement, escaping a fixed identity.

Between fragility and resistance, between fixity and collapse, these sculptures oscillate in a state of imminence. Like remnants from one time to another, like fragments of a story never fully told, they present themselves to us not asking to be explained, but to be perceived.

And in that instant when we pause before them, something shifts. Something resonates. It may not be in the form, but in the sensation that the formless, the uncertain, the not-yet-to-be, is the true territory we inhabit.

The pieces of Cosmic Corals act as portals to a new way of understanding the environment, proposing a possibility where matter is not passive, but an active agent in constant dialogue with the world. This quest not only reaffirms a number of assumptions about perception, but also invites us to reconsider our relationship with what surrounds us, challenging traditional hierarchies between the human and the non-human.

Ultimately, Cosmic Corals invites us into a world where the tactile and the visual merge to  destabilize our certainties. These pieces are not just objects, but entities that embody an alternative cosmogony, a universe where matter asserts its presence and confronts us with the reality of an interconnected and constantly changing world. Melnikova guides us toward a new relationship with the environment, a relationship built from the deep, from the hidden, from what is yet to be discovered.

Maria Garcia about Cosmic Corals, 2025 Atypical, Barcelona