The piece that lends its name to the exhibition as a whole, Chamarra negra, sudadera gris (2020), is grounded in Satorre’s detailed written description of a scene that takes place in a wooded area in Mexico City. The artist then made twenty-two drawings in his studio while reading this description. Each drawing is the equivalent of twenty minutes, with the whole accounting for seven and a half hours. During this time, in which there are subtle changes in light or weather conditions, a couple comes onto the scene and over the course of three hours engage in heavy petting which the artist also documented. Satorre, who has worked as an illustrator in the past, evokes Lope de Vega’s comic play The Steel of Madrid, in which the playwright refers to the habit of upper-class women from Madrid of the time to go to the forest to drink so-called ‘steel water’, a kind of iron-rich mineral water. This practice was recommended to remedy the harmful effects of eating small clay vessels coming mainly from Mexico and Portugal which were believed to have contraceptive properties and beautifying effects. The literature of the time quickly eroticized this practice, insinuating that these trips to the forest were excuses to maintain furtive sexual relations.

Several of the works in the exhibition came from a foundry in Legazpia. El martinete de Ricardo (2020) is a mural with laurel branches that have been bent into shapes from a martinete or trip hammer which was once used in the Bellota factory years ago. Inversely, a number of iron sculptures replicating laurel branches were made using broken tools which Bellota had sent to the foundry for repair.

As part of his working method, Satorre often uses a reversal of scale as a conceptual and formal resource. For instance, in Hachita (2020) the mass of the steel fragments made during the process of production of an axe is reversed. The reproduction of the smallest fragment is given the mass of the finished axe (almost two kilograms) while, inversely, the axe head itself is reproduced with a mass of just 30 grams.

Lo otro consists of two papier-maché sculptures, which replicate sections of the gallery’s pillars with the same diameter and texture, and a number of stones taken from a river and their exact copies made from rocks, in this case andesite sourced from a quarry in Cuenca, Ecuador, which are placed on and around them.

Finally, Terraja (2020) is a sculpture in which a tool to make plaster cornices is encrusted in a plaster pedestal which Satorre had used to produce previous sculptures, thus at once annulling and exalting its functionality.