Jorge Satorre’s “Triplay” (2025) serves as the entrance to his exhibition “Ria”, currently on view at the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), curated by Latitudes. Two large wooden doors, embedded with metal casts of bananas and potatoes, form this threshold. Everyday objects are laden with both mundane associations and personal significance.

As artist Sean Lynch observes in “Río” (River), the accompanying publication that surveys 15 years of Satorre’s work (coedited by the museum and Caniche Editorial) Jorge’s interest in these particular foodstuffs “ranges from the straightforward simplicity of the day and stomach — a banana for breakfast and potatoes as part of your evening meal. It also exists more profoundly in his grandfather’s war diaries. In 1939, he walked north after the Spanish Civil War was lost, eventually ending up in a concentration camp at Argelès-sur-Mer. He then managed to escape in a potato truck and met his brother in Paris, where the first thing he asked for upon arrival was to eat a banana, before going into exile in Mexico.”

In “Triplay”, all these possible meanings are cast in aluminium, chosen for its lightness and low melting point. Reimagined as door handles, the bananas and potatoes invite our grasp, yet some are positioned too high, too low, or too near the hinges to be wholly useful, lending an awkwardness and a certain redundancy to the act of opening the door. The seemingly simple act of passing through a threshold becomes an idiosyncratically linked to human upheaval, material perishability, and enduring resilience.

“Ria” is Spain’s first institutional solo exhibition dedicated to Jorge Satorre, and is on view until August 31, 2025.