Jorge Satorre
Did I say I miss you?

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, IE
17 May – 6 July 2025

Jorge Satorre assembles sculptures, drawings and storytelling as a form of imaginative, narrative exhibition-making. He values the perspectives of historic texts from the Spanish Golden Age, Italian micro-histories, Victorian pictorial satire, contemporary political cartoons, and stories from artist friends, blacksmiths, and exhibition technicians he has worked with. This rich assortment of references feeds Satorre’s personal folklore as an artist, combining unfixed and varied absurd, semi-factual and anecdotal tales.

Satorre celebrates the flourishes of wit, beauty and ingenuity that break free from tradition and standardisation in all forms of making, while also embracing the technical aspects of skill and precision that define the qualities of a craftsperson. His work follows this ideology, whether it is a detailed pencil drawing, heavy-duty casting, forging, or feat of structural engineering. These processes, concerned with physical making and aesthetically assimilated and uniform craft works, put into focus the ways in which traditional artistic disciplines are often subsumed by colonial and capitalist systems. Despite an individual craftsperson’s skill and originality, production is regulated to repeated outcomes that aim for consistency in the marketplace. Satorre finds ways to highlight anomalies in fine handwork that reveal a craftsperson’s creative impulses, which are otherwise concealed or eliminated through a dominant preference for streamlined modes of production.

Satorre, himself a perfectionist, implements self-imposed limitations to slow down his work. These include drawing from memory, or relying on detailed written or oral descriptions from others, or working with complicated materials that require many stages of production, or by physically limiting the speed at which he works. These methods ensure that the outcomes of his practice resist homogeny through a tension between self-expression and regulation. Satorre’s connection of impersonal industrial activity to nature and intimacy creates a space for his work to function (or resist function) without established hierarchies.

Did I say I miss you? contains a large new sculpture and a set of pencil drawings on paper. The sculpture, Did I say I miss you? (volume), 2025, is made from a steel armature: a physical framework that permits a repeated pattern of sticks to be woven and formed to a repeated consistent shape. The system allows for variation, which is emphasised by the natural materials collected and utilised in the fabrication of the sculpture. In the contexts of Ireland, Dublin and Temple Bar, there are visual links to the wattle and daub structures excavated from the Wood Quay Viking settlement in the 1980s, or traditional creel basket weaving, which also accommodates inconsistency and expression in its structure, or other urban or agricultural forms. However, Satorre resists direct comparison or relationship to site, instead opting to draw attention to shared cultural histories and traditions over geographies and timelines.

The sculpture is fabricated with assistance and expertise of two artist colleagues, Adrián Castañeda and Joey Ordoñez who, together with Satorre, collected branches from aggressive spreading hazel and brambles in hillsides local to Bilbao, sharing stories and relaxing together. While there is a social aspect to the artwork’s fabrication, the labour was slow and painstaking. Satorre’s choice of brambles and his solo endeavour of weaving them through the metal frame became an intentionally dangerous activity with frequent wounds, cuts and scratches inflicted from the thorny branches. The concentrated process of making distances the workflow from an otherwise mechanical process. As Satorre describes a recent related sculpture, Ricardo, 2020, “the industrial loses its functionality, metal becomes vegetive, and mechanical forms turn into nature”.(1)

Pencil on paper drawings accompany the sculpture, depicting a surreal scene of a large gathering of insects populating the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios exhibition space from the perspectives of internal CCTV cameras, the building’s exterior as a maquette, and an insects-eye view. Satorre uses forms of self-referential drawing, satirical illustration, and technical diagrams that unsettle the expectations of that which might typically be venerated in an art gallery. Daniel Garza pinpoints the sharp subtlety of Satorre’s drawings in a recent text: “As in the best caricatures of this kind, the clues that unleash a quick and incisive reading are silent and suggestive”.(2)

Satorre’s drawings show an array of anthropomorphised ants, beetles, flies, and a worm seemingly enjoying their visit to his exhibition opening, mingling, contemplating the artwork (including the new sculpture described above), drinking wine and beer, and passing by the street outside. The shifts in proportion make it unclear if the space is inhabited by human-scale creatures or if the gallery itself is represented through a scaled-down model from which Satorre meticulously plots his installations. The apparent disconnect between the formal sculpture and figurative drawings is somewhat resolved in a paradox within the group of insects apparently admiring the sculpture, which is fabricated from their lost hedgerow habitat.

All manner of animals, birds and beasts have featured as protagonists in Satorre’s works: a house for mice made from a stack of magazines, paw and hoof prints recorded in terracotta tiles, and a legendary eagle that transformed from myth to reality. Satorre disregards age-old allegorical storytelling where animals are given human traits and flaws to enact scenes used for people to learn moralistic values, by creating new fables without any kind of moral message. Insects, and their labour, are subjected to many other impositions by humans: put to work to make honey, catch flies, turn soil, all the while being considered pests. Their natural eco-systems are imposed with imperialist terms such as colony, queen, worker, soldier, yet they are eagerly trodden on, or squished, when their ‘societies’ become too integrated in the human world.

Satorre’s fragmented approach to working through storytelling intentionally leaves unresolved plot lines, twists and revisions in order to evade the fixed interpretations and singular perspectives that so much of history continues to be defined by. His attitude towards chance and multiplicity much more closely reflects the joyous range and scope of inconsistencies and surprises of life experience.

Jorge Satorre (b. Mexico City, Mexico, lives and works Bilbao, Spain). Satorre’s solo exhibitions include Ría, Museo CA2M, Madrid (2025); Veste noire, sweat-shirt gris, CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2021); Los negros, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2021); Pelusa (permanent installation), Elica, Querétaro (2021); Chamarra negra, sudadera gris, CarrerasMugica, Bilbao (2020); Pancha, the Colorful Bird and the Shining Snake, REDCAT, Los Angeles (2018); Los animales muertos, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2017); Un tema moral moderno, decorar el agujero, LABOR, Mexico City (2017). Satorre has a long-standing connection with Ireland, participating in residencies in Askeaton Contemporary Arts (2014); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); Sherkin Island (2005); and exhibiting in TULCA, Galway (2024) and West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen (2007).

(1) Jorge Satorre, Río, Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid / Caniche Editorial, Biscay, 2025.

(2) Daniel Garza, 'The Virtues of Drawing', Río, Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid / Caniche Editorial, Biscay, 2025.