18Libro_Sinestesia_completo-final

I am reminded of the stories by Maurice Blanchot which disorient us in their
variability because they harbour a non-fictitious time, the time of the experience
of the conformation of shapes veering towards the unknown. They are forms
that vibrate, material resonances that smell, just like the geometry of Equipo 57
or Mark Francis’s dance to chaotic rhythms. Because even when it seems to have
stopped, time is experienced here. In Blanchot it is the time of the unheard-of,
or the darkness or, more specifically, the absence of time or the present without
presence. Hence the disturbing quality to the oil on burnt canvas by Bianca
Beck. The artist is speaking to us about birth, silence, tears, a flower that opens
and gives off scent, an ardent love. Fire and desire. Just like the oil painting on
wood by Anne-Lise Coste. Everything accumulates, concentrates, spills over.
The artists try to project a reality based on small densities, like the condensed
memory of Fernando Prats, or the smoke that concentrates the navel of the
world according to Eulàlia Valldosera.
Meantime, night falls and the landscape changes its face. The darkness
devours colours and the visible is hidden in the forest. The work by Claudia
Terstappen smells of the night. The denizens of the night develop the acuteness
of a nocturnal animal. At night we open ourselves to the unknown, to extreme
violence. Light constructs reality and freezes places, as in the video Inercia by
Carlos Irijalba. The boulevard becomes a bustle of vagabonds, as claimed by
Lamazares’ painting. The main character in the work by Bernardí Roig enters
the light like someone revealing a confession and encounters the divine. Our
face burns, like the characters by Douglas Gordon. With no nose and no eyes,
the fire snuffs out our senses. Like a road to destruction. The image, just like life,
is suspended, interrupted. And so we have reached the statues of our ancestors,
the outcome of an involuntary beauty that resembles the supposed aggression of
the pyromaniac. Works like those by Douglas Gordon and Valentín Vallhonrat
make us think about the beauty of the body eaten away by time in classical
sculpture. We love them in their broken beauty. We do not try to remember or
imagine the colour of so many polychromatic statues which have reached us.
An attractive abyss, that of the ruin of things, that of beauty decapitated by
iconoclastic acts, as Marguerite Yourcenar wrote.
The same holds true with the journey of darkness. The forest passage
recounted by Jünger, the ambush, is a march towards death. Darkness in this
sense is a kind of ending whose culmination is this fate. Irijalba and Lamazares
tell about the passion of transit. But Jünger’s forest talks to us about the
impossibility of going further, of shipwreck and darkness. It is no surprise that
the subject is thus revealed as a fragment in the case of Douglas Gordon, or as the
corrosion of the cadaverous body in Enrique Marty.
Almost one decade ago the person who wrote this sent Bernardí Roig a
letter to be read blindly. The artist had confessed to being afraid of the lack
of answers. Naturally, he was talking about life, but he was especially talking
about that shadow with an expiring passport which is death. Although he was
surely talking more about hope, that sort of antechamber. It is difficult for me to
imagine his characters going directly from one place to the other. In any event,
they find meaning in beating around the bush, like Lamazares’ vagabonds or
Irijalba when he manages to turn reality into a representation of itself.
At night, nothing is projected more than the light and smell of death. Enrique
Marty offers a sculpture which depicts a putrefied body found in a marshy
area very close to the water. The bodies that remain in this wet state, with
their entrails exposed, take on the qualities of the land, begin to mimic it and
give off a very particular odour. The same is true of Barceló’s still life, which
shows a suspended corporality, a bronze skewer that smells dry. Depicting the
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