Perfect means ‘finished, flawless’. And in every process there comes a day when everything ends. Avelino Sala presents a project in which all its components speak of the end: the end of time, the end of the economy, the end of Europe, the end of common welfare, the end of empathy in short, because everyone is now everyone’s enemy. The search for utopias, from Thomas Moore and Tomasso Campanella onwards, had culminated in its closest orbit in the so-called Trente Glorieuses, those years of undefined growth whose horizon of events seemed impossible to glimpse. However, the children of affluence have proved to be the harbingers of selfishness, for it is they who are destroying the future. And This Perfect Day speaks precisely to this whole eschatology of civilisation: the time of riots, golden dawns and bloody sunsets.
Along with the meticulous patina of the most classical academicism, the detailed drawings and delicate watercolours, Avelino Sala short-circuits his own discourse by inserting the idea of vandalism – not only in the everlasting hoods that populate his production – but also in the self-destruction of the graphic image itself through the graffiti of messages in the form of scratching out, reinforcing a message that annuls the transcendent idea that the work of art is a memento mori and that brings it closer to the baroque vanitas: all is emptiness, all is theatre, all life is dream.
Thus, the past, the present and the future make up the temporal warp in which Sala’s visual fabric is woven; the pieces are configured conceptually, formally and narratively as Chinese boxes but, at the same time, a panoply of ideas are arranged in them – by way of sampling, which reveals the articulation of the artist’s thought, as in his collages – which Sala cuts up, violates and manifests through the object or the history that is concealed behind it: Disparad sobre nosotros. El enemigo está dentro (2008) is embedded in the strata of time, and its observatory is as close to the Civil War (and its effects on Gijón) as it is to the accusatory paranoia of the surveillance society of the globalised world. Toni Negri and Michael Hardt thought that the concept of the nation-state was close, but recent events (Brexit, Trump’s victory, the East-West clash…) have forced a violent turn in the opposite direction: towards the strengthening of nationalisms and differentiating identities that eliminate the common connection with the Other and bring us closer to the worst omens of the 19th century. Gold has been the epitome of wealth for centuries, but in our contemporaneity it is more clearly interpreted that the golden gleam hides a dark underside: no more golden cities – Civita Solis (Campanella, 1602) – but the inversion (in its spatial and economic sense) of utopia as a productive field. Thus, aggressive executives with ambushes greet refugees fleeing from low and medium intensity wars and the value of currency is increased by feeding them with its vital fluids. And simultaneously, the myth of Icarus is reinterpreted as a metaphor for the collective suicide of a decadent society, for everything is business and ultra-protection.
Because Europe is armouring itself in order to destroy itself. The European project founded on the values of modernity – freedom, equality and fraternity are words without meaning in the neo-language – has collapsed on itself because it has reached a critical mass that is impossible to control: Europe is dead but by a strange quirk of fate it is a corpse that remains standing. Fire upon us for the enemy is within.
