The Weight  of the Hand

Keyna Eleison

2025

There are artists who travel through the world like furious winds, dragging with them the vestiges of a landscape that is reconfigured with each gust. Claudia Coca is one of these forces. Her work emerges as a corpus stretched taut between creation and ruin, where beauty and denunciation coexist in a fierce balance. By focusing on natural landscapes and traces left behind by humans, Coca reveals a choreography of resistances and insurgencies. Her images are woven fabrics of confrontation: nature that springs forth and resists, and the human hand that insists on measuring, classifying, and destroying. But even in the face of violence and pruning shears, something pulsates, insists, and flowers—a battlefield on which organic matter always vigorously prevails.

 Between the delicate weave of the cotton and the dense strokes of charcoal, there emerges a landscape of encounters and violences, gestures that name and destroy. The images that arise are made of a brutal contrast: organic forms, living beings, and landscapes that expand across the textile, outlined now firmly, now with the delicacy of a reverent observer. At the center of this visual narrative is the human hand—a gesture that moves closer to touch and understand, but which also suffocates, shears, and erases.

 These drawings reveal a nature that insists on surviving. Animals camouflage themselves; leaves intertwine in arabesques; landscapes stretch out on planes that now embrace, now repel. The cotton, with its soft, porous texture, seems to observe the charcoal lines, as if each stroke were an ephemeral record of presences that come and go. Color, always strictly contained and nearly absent, appears only in case of pressing need—as if chromatic excess were a kind of violence in itself.

The images suggest a continuous cycle of expansion and containment. While on the one hand, the natural elements are presented with vigor, on the other, the human hand intervenes— fencing, trimming, transforming the landscape into a field for exploration and consumption. This hand, which in human history has established itself as a tool of creation and conquest, here reveals itself to be an agent of disturbance and control, as well. Within it, there is a latent contradiction: between the desire to name and the impulse to seize and appropriate.

The insistent presence of that human hand, which seeks to measure, contain, and impose order upon that which escapes its control, also reveals a silent anguish: the impossibility of fully subjugating nature. This obsessive attempt to domesticate reveals a paradoxical movement—while the hand traces lines on the landscape to fence it off, these very lines ultimately reveal the strength of that which resists touch. Each gesture of domination leaves behind vestiges which the charcoal explicitly denounces.

Cotton, a fragile, absorbent fabric, becomes a stress field where the lines reveal themselves as wounds and organic forms take on an air of insurgency. Each sheet of paper drawn is inhabited by a tension between presence and absence, resistance and annihilation. Landscapes suggest a nature that repairs itself despite the marks that humanity insists on imprinting upon it. Cotton, as a supporting medium, evokes the fragility of organic matter—a fabric that can be torn, marked, burnt, but which paradoxically also embraces and records, like a palimpsest of gestures and memories.

In the visual economy of these works, color erupts like a scream—rare, precise, appearing only when absolutely necessary. This restricted use of chromatism shows that an excess of color would be almost a mistake—as if the fabric itself were rejecting the artificial and preserving itself as a surface that breathes, absorbs, and heals. Thus, spots of color emerge as vital signs—a force of rebirth that emerges, now discreet, now intense, always shot through with urgency.

What is seen, then, is a tense choreography: a nature that insists on sprouting forth and a hand that wavers between care and domination. In this dance, each stroke of charcoal, every appearance of color carefully inserted, testifies to the attempt to balance the creative and destructive forces that accompany human presence on earth. The images reveal not only the traces of someone who wants to consume, but also someone who attempts to retain, preserve, or even revive that which it has destroyed.

In these works, there is a precise perception of time. Plants and landscapes appear like bodies that recall the cycles of germination and harvest, life and death. The charcoal lines evoke the ashes of something that has burnt—a kind of obscure memory of that which was incinerated or erased. And despite it all, in the remains of the fire, something sprouts. The cotton accommodates these scars and acts as a vivid support, where the memory of destruction becomes the possibility of renewal.

The artist’s gesture reveals that each landscape is also an arena of dispute— between that which sprouts and that which is extinguished, between the hand that draws and that which erases, between the attempt to name and classify and the impossibility of fully containing that which pulsates, grows, and escapes.

The forest is alive. It will only die if the white man insists on destroying it.

If they succeed, the rivers will disappear below ground, the soil will

crumble, the trees will wilt, and the rocks will crack under the heat. The

parched earth will be left empty and silent.

The Xapiri spirits, who descend from the mountains to play in the forest

with their mirrors, will flee far away. Their parents, the shamans, will no

longer be able to call them or make them dance to protect us. They will not

be able to frighten away the plumes of epidemic that devour us.

They will be unable to contain the malignant beings, who will turn the forest

into chaos. Then we will die, one after the other, both the white men and us.

All the shamans will end up dead. When

there are none left alive to hold up the sky, it will collapse.

—Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, La caída del cielo [The Fall of Heaven]

Claudia Coca is a force of nature. Her expression is made of that which pulsates and insists, that which captivates and disarms. She knows the pain and ecstasy of being an artist—she knows the weight of denunciation and the absurd beauty that emerges even when ruin prevails. Her gaze is direct, forceful, and rebellious. She neither looks away nor softens this gaze. Even so, in the midst of the hardness of the lines and the tension of the strokes, she offers moments of rapture—beauties that refuse to surrender, instead bursting forth like a revelation.