Some Words
QUERER PARECER NOCHE
CURATORS: BEATRIZ ALONSO AND CARLOS FERNÁNDEZ-PELLO
We are caught, as always, between desire and appearances, between the wanting and the seeming of a Spanish night that does not let us see completely. Between the historical nostalgia we have inherited and the histrionic moment we must live, it is in the baroque, in the dusky, in the greasy, where we find some paths of negotiation with a tradition that pains us and eludes us. The tale of a city without image, in whose darkness also appears the clarity of an idea, the inspiration that the text lacks, or the serenity and concentration of silence.
Querer parecer noche is an exhibition that gathers different forms of artistic production in Madrid to imagine with them a darkness. Instead of an objective analysis, we raise a curtain of anachronisms and discrepancies; instead of a portrait of the scene, we abandon ourselves to the intuitions and intrigues of the palace. A partial, eccentric delirium, perhaps the fruit of passion or bedroom secrets, serves us to speculate on what makes singular a city that continuously escapes continuity. Without a strong genealogy or school, everything that traces a temporal or narrative line is here love, illusion, or coincidence.
The incision we propose is one of many possible ones of a context, with its different sensibilities and ways of making, where the idea of the local is constructed astride those who inhabit it and those who are passing through. A limbo or plateau, suspended between north and south, that is defined by embracing without complexes the outside, sometimes with more enthusiasm than what grows within. Faced with this contradiction, we also flee the city to find it: we descend through the works as down a tower of mirrors, echoes, and replicas, and we weave an ambiguous, fragmented plot, hopefully somewhat transformed, that incorporates the idea of scene into our daily phantoms.
We wonder then if artistic production in the city can be understood from chiaroscuro: when filtered, in the mid-afternoon of the driest summer, the sun beats down and interiors sink into the wanting to seem night of the net curtain or the blind. In the midst of that diurnal or blinding terror, in the shadow of a thick curtain, appear the ruins of a last kingdom, the mirage of a central labyrinth, or the vision of a monster with a soft brain and warm heart, which seems more a dream than a real thing.
It has been almost a year since we accepted the commission to venture into the guts of this subterranean Madrid invented by ourselves. Traveling through its humid tunnels, going up and down through its passageways and nooks, we have wanted it and stopped wanting it about a thousand times. In the confusion of that brown making, clumsy but brilliant, we open a cut in the court to, as at the festival, bring together the familiar and the strange. We will try to ensure that, at least for a time, families cross paths, works become irritated, enmities rub against each other, and it becomes necessary to scratch at the forms of the city. A rumor of half-sleep, a shiver down the neck, a tightening of the stomach, or the hiss of a serpent. Where any resemblance to fiction is, in addition to being very real, the most valuable of our belongings.
The exhibition is part of the different celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo and brings into relation the work of 58 artists, of which 20 are newly produced, with a majority weight of the local scene.