“The SETS series is formed mainly by two expressive typologies. The first, represented by THE DEVICES (1/2/3/4): tectonic structures or artifacts that through the articulation of their parts and mechanisms reveal a process of transmutation. They conform minimal stage sets, which speak as much about the artist’s daily work as about her transcendent nature. Metaphysical stage sets, a kind of Aristotelian “immobile motors” that, through a controlled staging, become totemic figures that generate individual reflection, contraptions where everything is modeled by a sophisticated, primitive power. They can be perceived as abstract confessionals, secrétaires of forgotten dreams, or as furniture for a boudoir destined for feminine secrets, where geometry, wisdom and sensuality are the mysteries to be protected.

The second typology, THE DIORAMAS (5/6/7/8): made up from autobiographical portraits of desire. Still lifes’ still alive in memory, where objects and images, textures and planes, create cabinets for a taxonomy of remembrance, classifying intimate inventories from a vital journey. Portraits of lost emotional landscapes, recovered through a constructive framework (a time machine).

Light, shadow, color and silhouette are fundamental attributes in both categories. Balthus, Dario Argento's cinema giallo, elemental cubism, Tinto Brass and Marcel Duchamp, all of them whisper from and towards them.

The entire series of SETS is tinged with the varnish of secrecy. One has the sensation, at once sweet and uncomfortable, of observing something almost forbidden, of being a ghostly intruder in the intimate sphere of the person who has imagined and assembled it. This tense perception of slight voyeurism, is reinforced by matters inherent to the very spirit of the work. The exhaustive description of the materials that make up the pieces and the exact resolution of their mechanisms. The certainty that these scenarios exist only in an intermediate space, located within a liminal world, inhabited in turn by the imminence of solitary pleasure and the ritual of whatever has been hidden.  

All of these elements resonate in Isabel’s body of work, and perhaps they are an echo of her own corporeality as a human and as an artist.”

Critique by Sergio Márquez Architect + Artist