The sea as an intersection space between the different views that cross paths in this exhibition, did not come from nowhere. Neither it was a predefined idea. It simply emerged by itself, in a natural way, patiently looking in the archives of Raíña Lupa’s art space.

 

 

 

Most of them – Vari Caramés, Santos Montes, Francesc Torres, David Levinthal – María Jesús González and Patricia Gómez – have shown their work at some point in the latest programme of the gallery and editorial. Isabel Coixet and Manuel Outumuro are doing it for the first time.

 

In his introduction for the “Buscando el Norte” (Searching for the North)  catalogue for Santos Montes, Dionisio Cañas argues that photography is giving yourself to the world, visible and invisible, without conditions or prejudice, and leaving reality (with its unrealistic side) use us as a way so that it can materialise, to become visible on the surface of the paper, coming together and mixing with human time, the  photographer’s and the viewer’s temporality. It is also the starting point for this voyage through pieces of the sea (the Cantabric and the Mediterranean) that photography, wall prints and cinema come together.

 

“ The sea ( to which later came the rain, extension and reason of being of the seas and pool-ponds) as meeting places between 5 creators: a lying line from the Great Head to the shape, and at the end / a mirror between two smiles and the dream, and its fevered light – a similarity of seas in the immediate” – wrote Carlos Oroza.

 

“What does the eye look for in the sea, in the rain, in the water? Why is it hiding in a space of tension and mistery? Why does it conjure iself in it? Perhaps silence? Infinite? Survival instinct? Appearances? Light? Memory? The sea has the quality of a wall, of a prison, impenetrable… of finite if you do not enter in it” (Robert Hughes).

 

The sea is repetition, tension and uniformity, like the inside of a prison. The creators that come together in this liquid cartographies look for traces of their memories – and others’ in the sea and the water. In the ones left by storms and tides in beaches and rocks. Or the water on the skin of a swimmer, the rain on the streets and the prisoners on the graffitti in a prison wall. And they find them without submerging in it, surfing with from the sand, the streets, the port, heights and harbors with their objectives. It is not the sea seen from the see itself (in the sense of offshore breakwaters like Santos Montes suggests) – but from the windows of their borders.

 

We are water/ look at yourself in the mirror/ and you will see a storm/ untransferable – wrote Francesc Torres in the poem for his Tormenta (Storm) series. An objective artist like him – who at the same time has never forgotten the natural signs – could not explain it clearer. And in the same space, a dark soul like Outumuro, a neo-romanticist such as Santos Montes, a master of lightness such as Caramés, Isabel Coixet who is so literary, tender and never rethoric, the apparently vane Levinthal, the archeologists María Jesús González and Patricia Gómez, and some poets – nod between parentheses of silence that separate them and unite them: it is what we are.

 

Gabriel Planella

Exhibition Curator