(The light hovers in front of something outside this time).

Look:
Before looking at the body of work that makes up Cabeza de Rio – after greeting each other, drinking coffee and talking as we drove down the back roads from Jerez to Trebujena – we talked about old architecture and new ornaments, about the wonder of forms that shift in memory yet remain, piercing the retina for a time: a kind of fixation, of diffuse flames.

They produce outcroppings, silhouettes that can be felt underneath others, like reverberations, like waves. And the exhibition takes its name from Lorca’s Pequeño Vals, and so I wonder: what river head (cabeza de río) are we crossing? What disguise is being presented to us? By passing over a shape so many times, these paintings – like annotated wanderings – find their origin in a cutout, a pattern, another shadow.

Like an alignment of waiting presences – a series of visions – imagine navigating an exhibition where each piece is a love that returns, a circle of archetypal forms, of invariants. And Cabeza de río builds a dictionary that is only partially remembered – that lives in the stony skies of the masses, in the buildings along the streets, in another now – where perhaps this dance of rebounding lights, undulating, holds a promise.

Think of a shape before you paint it, and like Guston1 – he tells me – the shoe and its sole become the moon, and when you paint it, the moon becomes bread, and painting always wins, the waltz wins, the disguise wins. Think of where this river head flows and from what echoes these forms emerge? And as we leave the waltz with its flames, these fixations, like silent waves, pray for the vagaries of painting and pleasure, for the hand softening into cotton, for a form of devotion. And so they remain on our retinas.

See?
The light hovers in front of something outside this time.

______________________________

¹ I Paint what I See: Phillip Guston (Penguin Modern, 2022)

Critical text by Diego Delas for the exhibition

With the support of