017_Springbreakers — Yul Tomatala CH

Spring Breakers

Solo exhibition
Espace HIT
Geneva, CH

2024

Spring Breakers, 2024, 23 sun breakers installation, steel frames, gelatin diffusion filter, 670 cm × 29×206 cm

Untitled Grey, 2024, cardboard pillar, 330 cm × 15×15 cm

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White Garden, 2024, installation, 3 plantersfilled with cracked concrete, 100×50×13 cm each
Untitled (Orlando) undated, photography inkjet print, aluminum frame, 40×60 cm

As part of the Spring Room at HIT*

Aligned in front of HIT’s windows, twenty-four sunbreakers—made from black gel filters stretched across steel frames—partially obstruct the outside light. Yul Tomatala’s installation acts as a modulation device, a screen that is both porous and dense, staging a tension between visibility and opacity. These filters absorb the transparency of the space and alter its perception: the spring light is fractured, veiled, fragmented.
Inside, a photograph: a nude man seated on a chair in an undefined interior. The image appears suspended, poised between surrender and resistance. The body—exposed yet calm—resonates with the filtering architecture of the sunbreakers. It offers a silent reply to the outside world, suggesting another form of retreat, of threshold.
Three elevated planters complete the arrangement. Covered in cracked concrete, they evoke broken ground, dry and wounded surfaces. Their sculptural presence, almost discreet, mirrors on the ground what the filters enact in the air: a quiet struggle between control and crumbling, between envelope and fracture.
Spring Breaker unfolds as an extension of the Spring Room, a project by Denis Savary and Claire FitzGerald, conceived as a shifting homage to Vita Sackville-West. While Sissinghurst 2 journal pubished for the ocasion braided voices and masks around springtime and its ambiguities, Tomatala reverses the luminous side. In his work, renewal is not an explosion of buds but a diffraction—a tension of thresholds: of intimacy, the body, vision, and landscape.
An invitation to observe what, at the edge of spring, resists brightness.

P. N.