La necesidad de lo infinito

Chema Alvargonzález commented in an interview with Stefano Gualdi that "the word, like architecture, is the reflection of the collective state of the human being [1]". No wonder then that his words (in iron, light, video, photo...) erect as constructions whose shape – beyond the visual limitation that the materials give us – hides a language of its own, whose unlimited versatility offers to its spectator, whatever their perception is, the possibility of extracting from it that facet with which more people empathize, bringing out its most authentic side.

Presencia (Presence), 2008 was conceived to honor the memory of Inés Suárez, who from her native Plasencia (Spain) broke with the conventions of his time and made to the Americas.

Beyond his exploits as a colonizer, what hosts the piece is the intensity with which Inés Suárez lived and took the reins of his destiny, leaving for posterity the trace of a unique personality.

In this way, Presencia, 2008 encloses in its graphology a history –like Inés’-, as wide and intangible as nuances have our senses, confined in an iron body. Nevertheless, Presencia, as a conscious entity and universal nature, shuns of this vast skin that keeps it stagnant with the intention of fulfilling the task of any word of its size: to be perpetual. Therefore he tries to escape, in a continuous movement that reveals itself through an evident "fight-dance" between meaning and signifier, matter and idea,that physically deconstructs in front of our eyes. A dichotomy that has its balance in the formal expression of the piece and all that derives: the weight of the material, the air that transpires, the light that emanates and with it the shadow, whose transmutable property allows the body to acquire innumerable tones, environments, messages , that is to say, it possesses the space-time; it presents thus all those ethereal records that in principle seem to be lost in the air, but that they really stay dormant, always attentive, in the most hidden part of our memory and making act of presence, either by treason or fortune, before the most insignificant and unsuspected element.

In this case, the light’s weight and the shadow’s shape, the color, the surface’s texture where it is projected, the aroma that releases the dust that contains the air mixed with other individuals around us... Scent, colors, textures... They can whip how punctured in the chest’s center in the form of a memory or walking like a small bright light our spine, is then when the words come into play and begin to sprout to allow us an accurate reconstruction of our experiences from its intangibility, showing that the presences, like the scents, are in continuous circulation around us.

Lilianna Marín de Mas
April 2015
[1] Gualdi, Stefano; Chema Alvargonzález: Reflejos de Ciudad (Milano, 2001)