Thirty Hotel Rooms - Raúl Hevia

About

The show that gathers his latest project is materialised in one single installation which is accompanied by a limited-edition publication, and whose title - taken from the repetition of the same book cover picture from 30 different books -  echoes through the volumes and photographs that comprise the whole of this project. Thirty Hotel Rooms takes up common reflections in Hevia’s work, spanning from the malleability of the private and interpersonal relationships, to the conducts through which narrativity circulates.

Hevia uses his interest in recovering fundamental works from the history of art as a method to explore how the narrative potential of certain pictures alters our more private surroundings, as well as the way in which they shape our collective imagery with their presence.  In a way, the collection of volumes that Raúl has been building throughout the years represents a showcase in disuse. The chosen picture, repeated and worn, inverts the process of the   illustration - either representative or allegorical - in order to become a space for alienation, empty and spectral. This subtle alteration of the nature of the picture obstructs its reading, transforming it into a space for the creation of reflections, where the identification, veracity and integration of the individual in the world is being questioned. Thirty narratives and thirty pictures, arranged around the idea of the reflection, of the mirror as a distortion device that alters our perception of reality and at the same time provides us with multiple points of view. As in a kaleidoscope, the images are everywhere, forever multiplying their meanings and at the same time unifying their identity.

The combination of the literary and the purely visual gives way to a moment that is mutable and static at once, a memory palace where memories of interconnected rooms, either architectonic or psychological, succeed each other; whereas the very content of the books opens the paths to a metanarrative where the narrator arranges the story differently each time. Charged with a certain nostalgia, Thirty Hotel Rooms is built on the recycling and transformation of one single picture that triggers associations, obsessions, memories and strange encounters. A fertile terrain for the conflicts between individual memory and the collective unconsciousness: between the intimate and the fictitious.