INVESTEC CAPE TOWN ART FAIR, Cape Town, South Africa

Tomorrows/Today | TT1

Solo Project by Andrea Davila Rubio

“Clean Look / Daily Protection”

Under the title Clean Look / Daily Protection, Andrea Davila Rubio’s solo project unfolds as an installative choreography of sculptures that approach the body as a site where practices of care, discipline, and defence intersect. The artist examines how gestures associated with self-care, particularly those derived from the cosmetic and skincare industries, are entangled with broader biopolitical ideologies of protection, security, and self-regulation, echoing the logics of militarisation that permeate an increasingly tense, war-driven global landscape.

At the centre of the project lies the notion of the “clean look”: an aesthetic regime defined by smoothness, uniformity, and the systematic erasure of imperfection. Popularised through fashion and wellness cultures, it promotes an ideal of (unattainable) perfectionism: an apparently effortless, re-created naturalness produced through intense self-discipline. This form of performative wellness can be genealogically traced back to eugenic and scientific racism, as well as to the interiorised narcissistic psycho-power in which the contemporary individual is no longer conscious of their own subjection. Cleanliness thus functions as a form of aesthetic anaesthesia: nothing protrudes, nothing disrupts. Davila Rubio reads this aesthetic regime not as neutral, but as a disciplinary language that aligns the notion of beauty with conservative and normative ideals. Interiorised practices of body care become inseparable from social legitimacy and self-confidence, forming an invisible armour —one disproportionately designed for female-identifying bodies.

This tension is articulated through a body of new works developed during the artist’s first year at the Institute Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at HGK–FHNW in Basel. In the series Daily Protection, chainmail-like sculptures evoke both historical armour and contemporary garments —metallic second skins designed to envelop the body. Small metal amulets, shaped as stars or keys, puncture this defensive logic, introducing fragility, belief, and vulnerability. In Clean Look, head-like sculptures —produced in epoxy resin through silicone moulds derived from cosmetic face masks— appear sealed and expressionless. Encircled by aluminium belts tightened with ceramic buckles, these forms suggest containment and regulation: facial skin becomes a surface to be disciplined rather than a mirror of inner emotion.

Material research (here involving resin, metal, and ceramics) is central to Davila Rubio’s practice. Matter becomes the site where poetics take form, enabling an investigation into zones of ambiguity: between the human and the non-human, the organic and the synthetic, the masculine and the feminine.

The accompanying sound piece Prepare, Protect, Disappear ✧*:·ﾟ  extends this ambiguity: a text is read aloud, oscillating between instructions for applying a facial mask or cream and those for painting camouflage onto the body. The listener remains uncertain whether the voice is preparing a body for care or for concealment within a war context.

Mariella Franzoni

Curator