“(…) I sense that the artists gathered for this project intend to paint the fire-stains on the sun with sulfur. The stain has no definite form; it is an unclassifiable remnant, an accident without a name. The fascination with fire stems from its ceaseless movement and its capacity to excite nearly all the senses at once. The crackling of what burns releases an unbearable smell. While the colours dance, its heat comforts as much as it frightens.
The title of this exhibition proposes an image as a starting point. Like a Fire in the Sun evokes a very real risk today: the impossibility of listening and perceiving — that is, of paying attention — within an incessant and enveloping saturation of information and images that subjects our attention to continuous disorientation, preventing us from focusing on or lingering long enough with any detail, even the one that ultimately proves decisive.
It is very difficult to observe a fire within another fire infinitely larger, such as the Sun. It is an almost impossible image. And yet, what matters is precisely to await this possibility. To find a stain whose visibility depends only on a slight difference. If everything burned in the same way, there would be nothing to see. A fire in the sun ought to be invisible — and yet sometimes a remnant remains: a temperature difference, a distinct density that betrays the presence of something formless and resistant to the saturation that renders everything indistinguishable.
The works of Javier Arce, Manuel M. Romero, Natalia López de la Oliva, and Alícia Vogel seem to be arranged in the elongated space of the Mayoral gallery to offer encounters with what has not yet been named. They seem to offer the viewer flashes through which to take pleasure in painting and, after slow observation, to find what overflows and exceeds without submitting to the tyranny of domesticated form — even if this is almost impossible to represent, like a fire within the sun.”
Text by Francesco Giaveri, curator of the exhibition
