The Spanish duo formed by Julia Fuentesal and Pablo M. Arenillas creates works that bear witness to the act of their fabrication. Neither design objects nor representational (or, on the other hand, abstract) sculptures, Fuentesal Arenillas' works are visible evidence of production techniques: templates, pattern boards, seams, joints. Materials that are usually the basis for some other artistic activity, such as canvas, MDF or wooden boards, become the protagonists, as in the works of Fuentesal Arenillas. Rigging (2022). Curved and intersecting panels of boards, covered with canvas, nailed, stitched and pinned, project from base panels that seem to define their contours. These are objects that stop before resolving, remaining in a state prior to form or function.

'Aparejo', or 'equipment', suggests something of Fuentesal Arenillas' investigation into the nature of 'artistic' objects. An aparejo is something that serves to accomplish a task; in Spanish, the word can also mean the preparation of a goal or project. Rather than appearing as 'fully formed' works of art, the duo's creations dramatize the processes of formation embedded in the manual labor, the result of which paradoxically seems both finished and provisional. The tools themselves are incorporated into the sculptures, as in the carpenter's plane and chisel that form part of Commissure XI (2024), a collection of irregularly curved wooden pieces tied together with string. A nod to the history of surrealism appears in Family VI (2023), in which wooden hatbox blocks are placed on rough chipboard cabinets, within which hang other forms of canvas and cardboard; the various blocks playfully suggest male and female forms, referring to the sardonic objectification of sex present in Duchamp's work, and to the Dadaist preoccupation with the mechanization and regimentation of human beings, as in The hat makes the man (1920) by Max Ernst.

Family VI is a kind of Russian doll of postponed results: the hats are not made, but anticipated; the human bodies are insinuated, but appear only as wrappings of non-functioning organs. Anticipation and preparation, however, ultimately become the work. Tangram III y IVfor example, might be shallow wooden trays filled with irregular offcuts of MDF, piled up as if they were the result of a failed attempt to restore their original jigsaw-like unity. Held upright (supported on meticulously crafted wall brackets), they resemble abstract paintings, as does the stitched pink linen canvas, stretched tightly over the wooden frame of V Vineyard V (2024).

Here, similarities question changing forms of critical attention in art, with echoes of other artists who also questioned conventional ways of thinking about sculpture and painting (e.g., Box with the Sound of Its Own Making by Robert Smithson, 1961, or the deconstructed paintings of the painters of the movement, 1961. Support Surface). For Fuentesal Arenillas, what is at stake is work, craftsmanship and creation; and the moment when these activities are considered "art".

- J.J. Charlesworth (The Frieze Week Survival Guide, published in Gertrude)