NICANOR ARAOZ, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, 1981 A rabbit lies on top of an inflated beach ball. Hollow upon hollow. An everlasting and painless eternity. I’m talking about pain. About pain that is no longer felt. About my inability of verbalizing an ending. About an expansive hole in the thorax that holds an eternal echo. Taxidermied animals that stage vengeances and manoeuvres. They are on the edge / precipice of what is present /absent. Being that were. Animals that are without being. They’re oozing quietness in a sugar palace. There, vengeance, sadness and anger are entwined and create a constellation that rocks on my bed. Outlines are, skin is outline, skin is edge, beginning and end. Entrails and fluids are absent, they’re removed, and, with them, all sensations are taken away from the body. It’s only a distant dream that we’re trying to evocate. All kinds of caresses are only a distant nightmare. Greek tragedies, Walt Disney’s fables, woods full of secrets, bazaars full of colours, sweets, heroes, victims and bandits. They are as kind as the silence of a cloud. As kind as the destruction of a whole meadow by a tornado, a loaded gun in the closet, a dozen of watermelon sweets in the pocket, a tiny insect from whom we suspect a deadly bite. FLORIAN BECKERS, Dusseldorf, Alemania. 1971 My work is about photographic images that emerge from the darkness and disappear partly into it again. The "fragments of reality" that can be recognized in the images reflect human behaviours. The things which are just visible serve only to trigger off something that exists beyond reproduction but means the essential. The images can thus only disclose themselves to the observer himself. They must be completed by the power of his imagination. CRISTINA CALDERON, Barcelona, 1972 Hálito (Breath) belongs to a series of works around the idea of time. “Halito” wants to overlap different layers of time as if time could be thought as it were an onion. A layer upon another layer shows two different images: a still time, sedimented, a continuous and undying present (represented by the drawing) upon another one that continuously fades away, dilutes and repeats eternally (video). Stillness and movement. The interior of a room inhabited by untidiness, use, disuse, expiry, the prescription of objects, books, letters, that, when abandoned maybe are put on tables and grounds. The stillness of the whole fades away when a breath invades the room. We can stop or move, but we’ll never get away of our restricted reality, which is limited by a specific space and time. The apparent freedom expressed through the papers flying off is self explanatory as they fly in circles: nothing is moving. MARTA ESPINACH, Gelida, Barcelona, 1967 Photos of surreal passing through spaces. These scale model spaces are shown as strange and inhospitable with the help of light effects. They are imaginary spaces where the interest is focused in a space that becomes a nowhere, a maze conceived for not staying and to pass through. With this concept in mind, these interior spaces like theatres or dollhouses have plenty of doors, corridors and openings, with the anxiety of not knowing is beyond: A space we are forced to roam and pass through, without knowing where our steps will lead us to. MIQUEL JORDÁ, Valencia, 1963 Body & Soul. Reflection on the human being duality of body and soul. Based on the last century common practice of taking photographs of dead newborn babies in Mexican families, gives the artist the chance to create a perspective of the memory of their existences. Fetish portraits and painful icons which oblige us to think about the brief transition our lives are. MASLEN & MEHRA, TIM MASLEN , 1968 Perth Australia. JENNIFER MEHRA, 1970 London UK The works of Maslen & Mehra juxtapose images of moving people in busy metropolitan streets with vast spaces and landscapes. The contrast of these enlivened and heightened landscapes with the silhouettes of the figurative sculptures highlights the disconnection to nature that occurs in busy urban cities. Closer scrutiny reveals the gestures of the urban inhabitants: Someone is seen talking on his mobile phone; another moves with his heavy backpack through the metropolitan jungle, an obvious inhabitant of an urban rather than a rural environment. “The compositions contribute to the debate of whether people are a part of or apart from nature.” (Maslen & Mehra, 2005). RUTH MORAN, Badajoz, 1976 Painting is born, as almost anything, from a pure inner need. So, it is a substrate of life itself that is usually full of compressed feelings. The pictorial space is, for me, a piece of the mental space. And this space covers many different spaces. My referrals, in my case, are often based in nature; they penetrate and blend themselves in a magma of shapes and colors merging from the organic. Color, light, wefts, webs, roots: all of them are inner landscapes. I go into shape and overall in the symbolic elements that surround me. The eye has to keep its glance in this labyrinth and get lost in its road. The work that I do is dynamic and meditative. I work on my obsessions and I understand the artistic process as a catharsis. The work is based on a dialogue with nature, evocations and a shared feeling of being one with the whole. ANNA OLIVELLA, Vilafranca del Penedès, Barcelona 1969 Roads to nowhere, uninhabited landscapes that are often insinuated with poor clarity. The negative of the same image projected in symmetry. Also industrial indoors out of focus due to a layer of wax. White walls, large windows, empty spaces. Nothing changes, only the light that goes through the glasses and reflects the shadow of the same windows. The movement of the light, displacing the shadows that move in the same direction. Geometrical shapes that fade away and that invites us to contemplation and reflection, and to enjoy the pleasure of observing. JAUME PARERA, Barcelona, 1970 The videos made by Jaume Parera have been produced one after the other to give rise to a succession of episodes describing a process of destruction, degeneration and disintegration. They exemplify the demounting of the object, where it could be said that what is under attack is the artist’s own image or the mask that he chooses to show us. All of these short pieces in one way or another return to defeat. Strangely enough, however, their consistency hinges on their recurring attacks and the obsessive destruction, as well as ridiculing and making an assault on what is called self-esteem. Carles Guerra GISELA RÀFOLS, Vilafranca del Penedès, 1984 I try to make a reflection on fleetingness of life and the role of people in it as ignored, strange beings that are just passing through, absurd beings. JOSÉ LUIS SERZO, Albacete, 1977 Serzo, la química de la quimera. Serzo is the most chimerical thing we have nowadays in our country, when making reference to the district of Art. In his installations, in his canvas, in his collateral tools, in his drawings and photographs, in his sketches, in his video animations, in all this amazing cartography and atrezzo, everything is possible. Anything, but the obvious, the tacky and the superficial. Man only builds, in his secret chamber, the scaffolding to jump beyond and far away. He designs his own dream. He stares the clouds. He shapes in a sheet of paper the arms of his hallucinogenic windmills or the wings of his gigantic butterflies. He puts a soft armchair on the top of a peak. He plants a road of almost fluorescent flowers –a road that winds, in the same way the path of beauty and purity of things does. Serzo’s work always sets off from a tale. It is, meaning it in the best sense of the word, an eminently literary painting. His Blinky has something from Lindbergh –the first man to cross the Pond- and we suspect a lot more coming from Icharus –this mythological reference to the big Fall. The most important thing –the artist reminds us- is not in the journey, in our propulsion in time and space, but in the elaboration of this personal dream, in the sequence of its most significant images. What really matters lies in the auscultation of this moan –sometimes turned into music- of the spheres, the first beat of the cosmos. When enjoying his total art, a couple of lines by Hart Crane come to my mind: “A man told the universe: / Lord, I exist!” Serzo, a Renaissance creator that is also prone to Baroque and specially to Romanticism –Man in the edge of the world, Man looking down to the abyss. Some artists paint still-lives –still-lives touched by this dim light of the still objects, almost varnished with dust. In Serzo’s paintings, time stands still, it freezes the gesture, but with the difference that this painting –the whole art of the autor- is unceasingly creating the illusion of movement. As it were born from that vortex of Poe’s tale. I often have the impression that his oil paintings were, originally, darkness quadrants. And nothing else. And that from his brushes, when they touch that darkness, they spread the light. In the same way some diseases fill our body with skin rashes, with mad blood that seems to be exploding under the skin. Serzo’s brush needles the light in a canvas made of darkness in a stage curtain –such an appropriate word- that hides the great stage of shadow that human mind is. The show of the human comedy. The genius that puts everything at his chimaera’s disposal. The total architect, a great artist and an artisan expert in the most complicated arts. Serzo knows that beauty –from which his work represents an exciting interpellation- becomes an impossible obsession and yet vehicular of everything a man of genius projects and carries out. Jordi LLavina FLORENCE VAISBERG, Buenos Aires, Argentina. (capital Federal), 1979 My work is the construction of what is being concealed: a generation that has lost its voice, silenced and dulled by anguish. I capture this eternal instant before the awakening or the eternal lying. Sleeping lives, suicidal dreams, pending existences that through aesthetics get enhanced and endure.