A través del Reflejo

At the entrance we are confronted by our own image reflected in a mirror, while along the sides two small passages illuminated with blue light take us to other parts of the gallery. A video projection of the video “Canicas” is situated at a far, dark end of the gallery, transporting us along a slippery path such as Alice’s when she falls through the hole. Turning our heads, we notice we are behind the mirror looking at the gallery and the people moving through its space. On the other side, in the stairwell, a Vespa transports us far away, to an interior universe.

This itinerary causes us to rediscover the helpless distance between reality and representation. We are situated in the ambivalent space of our daily movements, preserving the magic of transit. We are made aware of trajectories and happenings, of a cartography of disappearing things; that which disappears behind us at every step.

"Interiorness does not cease to split us, to bend us although our unity remains"
Gilles Deleuze

A través del reflejo is a dialogue between two voices between the imaginary and the real, between two realities which are juxtaposed in a single trajectory.

The installation is developed around the concept of displacement. Despite the metaphoric complexity of the term, of the different levels he alludes to, Chema Alvargonzalez uses in his approximation the image of an everyday situation of movement; he weaves his discourse through this moment of absence and absorbed contemplation we feel when we see things passing by from the window of a train, or of a bus. Blending into the exterior through our reflection, our past comes to the surface, and for this reason to displace oneself is to investigate the time of one's own memory.

Chema Alvargonzalez seeks to place us in this ambiguous place in our daily journey, conserving the magic of movement. In this way he speaks to us of trajectories and courses, mapping out the things which disappear, what flees behind us at each step.

Through different scales, using architecture as a counter-point, our steps turn away from the frontier of the physical to come out in the imaginary, in those lost territories where we played marbles.

Chema Alvargonzalez works on the margins which delimit spaces of different kinds, interconnecting them through the reflection, leaving enough space for randomness to allow each to recover his own presence on discovering the insurmountable distance between ourselves and our double between reality and representation.

Chema Alvargonzalez and Marta Dahó