Alarcón’s practice unfolds as an alchemical journey through the twelve stages of spiritual transformation, with each exhibition conceived as a chapter in an ongoing process of purification and revelation. Aude Ardere marks the beginning of this investigation, opening the first stage of a path toward essential knowledge and personal transmutation.

As one approaches fire in order to understand one's own transformation, the artist invites us into this inaugural chapter:

In this first period, an essay on radical letting go, I contemplate with love the painful experience of when the soul leaves the body, its vessel. My work becomes a threshold where dense matter empties itself. This preparatory act gives rise to the cracks through which, with caution and shyness, I begin the process of liberating everything that weighs upon us and no longer serves our evolution.

With prudence, I place myself before the first step of this journey: calcination, governed by fire as the supreme force that burns away the veil of the superficial to reveal what remains—the perpetual, the essential. I shape and master each piece while simultaneously caressing it with flames, allowing glass and other materials to enter into an intimate dialogue.

Reflecting a deeply personal and introspective path, Alarcón draws upon encrypted references to spiritual alchemy and hermetic traditions. In a world driven by acceleration and immediacy, her work proposes a return to slower forms of knowledge, where transformation is understood not as an outcome but as a continuous state of becoming.

The works redirect the gaze toward what often remains unseen, suspending time within moments of silence, presence, and reflection. Entering this universe requires a form of surrender. Metal does not become gold through desire, but through temperature. Likewise, these works do not invite passive contemplation, but rather the possibility of transmutation. To illuminate, one must first dare to burn.

About the Artist

Vivian Alarcón is a visual artist specializing in glass sculpture and mixed-media techniques. Her work is informed by her previous experience in the textile industry and drawing, disciplines that have shaped a visual language defined by sensory and compositional precision, as well as a deep exploration of materiality.

She began her exhibition career in 2019 with the presentation of her work at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Through glass, organic gestures, textiles, and natural feathers, Alarcón seeks to give physical form to the invisible. She explores the translation of subtle concepts such as memory, consciousness, and energetic states into three-dimensional forms.

Currently based in Barcelona, she focuses her practice on sculpture and installation as vehicles for investigating mysticism, spiritual transformation, and the relationship between matter and the unseen.