Judit Gaset’s L’ordre i el caos: eucalyptus spheres explore order and chaos

Three years after the 2022 retrospective at the Sala de Govern, Judit Gaset returns with a new body of work built around spheres covered in eucalyptus leaves. The exhibition, L’ordre i el caos (The Order and Chaos), is on view at the gallery Art al Set until 3 January.

The large eucalyptus-covered sphere that closed her 2022 retrospective marked a turning point in Gaset’s imagery, and the new show develops that shift. The totems that dominated her earlier, prolific phase have been largely abandoned, as has the grafomania—strings of words and phrases—that once colonised many of her pieces. Vestiges of those elements remain: occasional text appears in some works, and the exhibition’s titles are often exuberant, almost poetic lines such as “In the temple of the infinite the spring leaves are arranged,” “The harmony of a thousand leaves covers your universe,” and “The wind moves the leaves seeking an impossible order.”

But the core of L’ordre i el caos is the sphere. Gaset employs both two- and three-dimensional formats—drawings, ceramics in clay and porcelain, and sculptural pieces—with an XXL drawing of a sphere and its internal play of leaves serving as a central pivot for the show. The eucalyptus leaves replace words as the primary motif, used to symbolize the universal principle of permanence through transformation: leaves grow, fall, decompose and become nutrients that feed other life, restarting the cycle.

A handful of cubes remain in the exhibition, a lingering trace of a previously predominant form. These cubes have been reimagined as containers, each with its own arrangement of leaves—each arrangement presented as a small, self-contained universe. The surfaces of many works are also covered with geometric figures and vaguely architectural structures that shift their apparent order as the viewer moves around them.

Gaset frames the relationship between order and chaos as a question of perspective. “Look at a willow,” she says. “From a distance it is an inextricable chaos of leaves. But if you lie down in its shade and look up, you begin to perceive patterns, the secret order that links the leaves to one another, them to the tree and the tree to the universe.” Her conclusion is that order and chaos are the same, an insight reached after years spent pursuing order while living amid chaos. The works reflect that tension: patterns emerge as you turn a piece, only to dissolve again when the view changes, and then reappear.

Materials and formats vary across the show, but the recurring motif of leaves—and the idea of cyclical transformation they embody—unifies the works. The exhibition articulates a shift in Gaset’s practice from textual and totemic approaches toward a sculptural and pictorial investigation of permanence, perspective and renewal.