Apenas una furtiva especie de viva cosa fugaz chanta chirlo voltaquín, saltariando

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It seems to show us an unknown zone that, if we pay attention, can be mistaken for a mystical enlightenment that can be strange. Here the act of feeling goes hand in hand with the act of falling, in a logic that can only be grasped if we are open to otherness. In these works, we find reflections that give shape to the most everyday sensations, which, plucked from the fog of our existence, cut out with a razor by the minds of the artists, seem “just a whisk brisk sly spry spink spank sprint of a thing theresomere, saultering”.

Of the various themes explored by the artists here, transience is perhaps the most notable, and the one that allows ambiguity rather than unambiguity to be emphasized. Take one of the works by Danish artist Rasmus Nilausen (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1980), entitled Untitled (2016), in which “we see a constellation of stars that looks like a saucepan”. It is a work that does not fix any of its elements: is what we see in the foreground a table or a bed? Is the green frame a window or a painting? “There is a very ambivalent element in the form of a five-pointed star that looks like a fruit”. And after pointing this out, the artist extends the transience of this interpretation by highlighting the existence of a luminous presence on its sides, “as if it were an object that had fallen from above”.

The work Será que yo estoy bien pero algo en mí se deprime (2020), presented in the collective exhibition Otrxs Mundxs: (Some) Other Worlds at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico, is the result of dialogues that Rita Ponce de León (Lima, Peru, 1982) had with people with whom she intensified close relations during the global, sudden, and unexpected event of that year. The artist questions our current forms of relationship and dependence: what do these people have to say to others we do not know? What we have to say to ourselves may also resonate with the rest of humanity. Ponce de León delves into the ephemeral processes of this period, searching for concrete experiences that affect us all.

Just as Ponce de León uses the gaze of others in order to find his own, the key to the works in this exhibition depends on the point of view we adopt: this is the case with the painting Foothills # 7 (2023) by Caragh Thuring (Brussels, Belgium, 1972), which evokes the geology of volcanic landscapes as well as the intensity of human passions. The artist suggests that the foothills are fertile but dangerous places, where life and death coexist and where rock melts, folds and reshapes in an endless cycle. The painting adapts, repeats, and recycles extruded fragments from an earlier painting of his entitled The Foothills of Pleasure (2022), emphasizing a process of self-imitation: the composition shares moments of connection with the “mother” painting, but also diverges, framing the same scene from a different point of view.

The change in perspective is crucial to the creation of this ambiguous image and highlights the poetic turns we find, for example, in the work of Luis Gordillo (Seville, Spain, 1934). The work in question is based on an earlier work entitled Blancanieves y el Pollock feroz (1996), in which he uses similar operations around depth: Little Cabeza (2000), intoned in blues with a curious volume, tries not to separate the figure (a pot-bellied bird with a small head) from the background (bluish clouds and an atmosphere of black-grey cliffs) offering a common detour in his practice. Gordillo seems to be asking which of the two backgrounds is deeper. It would be difficult to discuss their degree of depth, but both are atmospheres that evoke an earthquake, still formless things that in their spasms initiate a reality.

The work Cockerel Caught (2024) by the artist and filmmaker Rosalind Nashashibi (Croydon, United Kingdom, 1973) is on the same vibrant frequency: it captures, like a photogram, the moment when some men catch a creature as powerful, aggressive and proud as a rooster, provoking for a moment a suffocating atmosphere charged with an imbalance of power, signaled by the tension of the hands and the forthcoming transaction, which resembles a small detonation.