DUST AND CONCRETE (to sit and to wait)

'The Observer' (London, 2016) Oil on canvas, 30x25 cm.

Face: under your features the earth regroups.

René Char

I wonder what it is to walk amongst these images, amongst the offcuts and fragments, amongst these visions. Waiting (in Spanish esperar; from latin spēs, spero) implies hope, and belief, it is anticipation, and also fear. We anticipate the occurrence of something, of things to come.

The history of the world -its memory- is but a handful of anecdotes. And those need voices to order, reorder, revisit and redraw them; thus ad eternum. Perhaps the memory of the world is but a handful of images, repeating themselves, re-cutting themselves, forever finding damages, defects, flaws in the story. Darkness, oblivion: meanwhile an elder looks into the hole of the mind.

Personal histories are constructed and destroyed at the rate of speech. When voiced, they fade.  We change each time we enunciate ourselves, each time we talk about ourselves. We enumerate this and that, and yet we go back to certain images over and over again. Perhaps there is a lesson behind an obsession; intuition tells you: go back. And so we go. We return to look, and we enter into that which we still do not know, much less what is about to come. We enter the dark doorway, in a sunset of long shadows. Someone says: extract shadow from the light. The magician works continuously to uncover an alchemy, a final trick.

'The Masc' (London, 2016) Oil on canvas, 30x25 cm.

Maybe memories visit us more in the dark. We close our eyes to stop time, to record an image through memory. And we cry more in the dark, in the cinema, alone but surrounded. It is in the dark where we see better -and we are- one-step away from being alone: awake, but asleep. We close our eyes and strongly clutch at what the retina cannot hold: we treasure what will be gone.

And we start to contemplate all the happenings beneath the surface, examining the internal links at the core - stones that are created internally are more valuable: kidney stones, teeth, thunderstones- and contemplating that what is lit up and that what is created for hiding: masks and concealed heads in pharaonic tombs, for the dead to recognize themselves in an introspective journey into the bowels, inwards. Objects are produced to ignite magic, to be concealed. Enter the shadow and leave this moment in time. A final trick. Darkness, oblivion: meanwhile an elder looks into the hole of the mind.

'Dust and Concrete (to sit and to wait)' Exhibition view. Galería Juan Silió. Santander, 2016.