16 March - 4 May, 2019
text: Beatriz Escudero
Ángeles Baños
Plaza de los Alféreces, 11
06005 Badajoz
An almost unreachable point of reference. As difficult as trying to reach the horizon, that always distant line. Or as trying to decipher the thoughts of the other, from which surprisingly we will never get to know its unfathomable depth. The unknown to be revealed. How to decode the work of an artist who expresses and shows us the result of an accumulating process of years and experiences?
Distances, space and time. The chronological time presented to us by events is a linear scenario on which we now find only a few inert remains. Empty shells that tell us that what will survive us may just be a shadow of what we have been. The rest: skin, body, blood, eyes, tongue, heart; everything has disappeared. Materials in constant transformation like bismuth, used for molding fossilized body parts in action, revealed to us as fragile as our own existence. But this will not prevent them from surviving longer than us, almost miraculously. This strange material, which radiates light and breaks down with a single touch, will be the last to disappear from our world after a life that is estimated at twenty trillion years, more than the age of the universe. What will remain of us when we have died? What will survive if the fire and lava burn our bodies like the citizens of the old Pompeii?
A look at the past that questions our future. Again this seemingly distant horizon where we arrive day after day, step by step. In our contemporary and hyper-technological imagination, we envisage the idea of a New Middle age to come, a step back into the dark again, into the terror and the paralysis of our bodies, into the next Financial Apocalypse, ecological disaster or volcanic eruption. For everything moves, as the tectonic layers on which we base what we call civilization, everything is always and forever absorbed on the decline and extinction of the known.
Structures hanged on the walls resemble paintings but they do not hold any kind of representation. Fabrics superimposed on metal frames that emit waves, distorted and aberrant visual effects. Moire hallucinations that follow the spectator's footsteps around the gallery. It's there, you see it? Maybe I'm making this up, but I see something... It is not very clear, but there is certainly something there. Everything brings us to the same point, again and again. Do you see it now?
Arbizu summarizes in this set of pieces his intense experience after passing through the Academy of Spain in Rome, in which he relates he felt as a character who, in darkness and with a torch, explored his brain illuminating new connections that grew in him. As dark as it is said to be the new middle age to come.