MIAU PLANET

Bel Fullana’s (Mallorca, 1985) second solo exhibition at Galería Fran Reus begins with an improbable premise: the artist’s current location—an imagined planet from which she fabulates, reconstructing her habitat and her lived experience of (self-)isolation in an ultra-rural environment. This setting reveals itself to her as a hypnotic, toroidal fantasy, presided over by the moon. Under its lunar influence, she explores her own duality, building a pictorial study of the sensations this environment evokes.

The feeling of being in the middle of nowhere transforms the landscape into the perfect backdrop for anything to happen. And so, Fullana decides what will happen: she populates this place with dimensionless beings she feels at ease with—creatures of which she is also a part. The result is a powerful series of portraits: Siamese twins with four breasts and five arms, a disoriented alien, ninja electro-goblins, and the artist herself riding one of her dogs, now turned into a tractor. “After being locked up at home for so long, in the middle of the countryside and with only my boyfriend, two dogs, a sheep, night noises, and the moon for company, I’ve almost gone mad,” she says. “So I recreated the friends I’d like to have in a possible parallel reality.”

This parallel world evokes the atmosphere of a horror film, filled with strange phenomena. In the vastness of the night, alien abductions, murders with implausible weapons, gratuitous violence, wild sex, and spontaneous raves unfold—fueled by the imagined consumption of psychotropic substances. It’s an explosive (re)mixture where two parallel realities blur into one another, making it impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. It all hints at what could be, but ultimately is not.

For Fullana, the way she presents and narrates her work has become increasingly important (though it always has been). This exhibition is conceived scenographically, as a rejection of the sterile white cube she so despises. The gallery is transformed into a gloomy, shadowy wasteland—an idealized recreation of her imagined ‘Miau Planet.’ Elements from her actual home—wood, rigging, and other materials—are scattered across the space, subtly intervened by the artist. A central shed anchors the installation, which visitors must physically enter to see certain works, demanding active engagement and full immersion in the experience. And fog—lots of fog.