“I feel like spitting out the skeleton.”

I remembered this phrase while looking at some of Juliet's paintings. I've heard my best friend say it repeatedly throughout our years of friendship. I've never known what it refers to precisely, but I can suspect it's when you feel like anxiety has confiscated your being, or when you feel fed up with being you, or fed up with being a woman, specifically.

This visceral discomfort of inhabiting your body, of feeling the wind blowing inside your guts.

A naked body, crouching, exposed in a room where nothing is shown, except itself, because it's directly exposed by a harsh light, like a spotlight, as if subjected to someone's scrutiny. The motionless eyes that coldly stalk you as if they know you're guilty of a crime but can't give you away; they only watch you as you move around the room.

It all begins with an accident. Spilling a glass of wine on the carpet, spilling a few drops of sauce on your blouse. A stain triggers the gestation of a form. This is how the work begins, from a controlled accident. Beltrán initiates a narrative from a paint stain, her dialogue with the canvas like a report; it shows her the path to follow, and she shows it the memories she has stored: memories of her body, of the bodies of others, mentions of her two homes, and the different autumns she has witnessed.

There is a dreamlike quality to her pictorial work. Figures with diluted lines that externalize like an apparition, leaving you unable to determine their presence. The effect of seeing a ghost. Silhouettes that reveal a wavering sensuality and share the longing and vigor that intimacy brings. Once again, across the room, motionless eyes are watching you. Today, everything becomes clear.

In "From the Fingertips to the Center of the Gut," Julieta shows a video in which she weaves herself into a bundle of wool that seems to be formed from her insides, braiding it to knot like a second skin. A somatic plot that she wove little by little, as if with each weaving she accumulated her uncertainties and anxieties. “Wool is a material that holds memory,” Julieta told me when she was talking about the wool knot; she told me that the knot could take a long time to form, but could quickly fade.

I still can't tell at what point this action becomes a performance piece; whether these memories, traced on a canvas, needed to be narrated in the flesh, or if they first existed in an incarnate form and were later projected onto the canvas. The artist also presents an installation, titled "The Knot of the Present Body." The desirous body, satiated by the impressions the lump was plotting not only with its viscera, but also with those of many other bodies, and now all of them are united by the same gut, satisfied.

I wonder if I'm there too. In the vulnerability of nakedness and intimacy, in bed, tangling my insides with someone else's, in the scrutiny of the bright moon that examines every part of my scarcity. How does the way we are valued as women affect us?

Miriam Hernández Hernández