In the project “Sueño de nadie” the artist Avelino Sala (Gijon, 1972) works, from a perspective that unifies aesthetics and critical discourse, the environmental collapse from a fragment of a poem by Rilke.
The series of sections of trunks where one can read proclamations of the climate demonstrations makes nature itself somehow generate the protest. Formalized in tree sections that originally had a different function, here they are recycled into a sculptural object. The trees grow from the inside out and each year a new layer of wood is generated, a ring. The trunk is, in a way, a silent witness, a sort of map of memory that tells us what has happened in a particular time. These pieces present a text that is perhaps more telluric than direct. A section of a tree that more than dendrochronology, is archeology of the present. Here the message and the basic matter of our planet come together.
The series Naturalezas Muertas, on which he has been working for several years, maintains the idea of current criticism linked to the History of Art. A still life, a classic theme of 17th century Art, is the starting point to work with moss and preserved plants, which seem alive but are dead, and from there to generate sculptures, still lifes of the 21st century, as a wake-up call. TIME, LIFE, HOPE, but also his FUTURE and DESTINY, from the same series, which were exhibited a few weeks ago at the Art Week in the Plaza de Callao in Madrid. Or a globe developed with the same material, which shows us a planet strikingly alive but dead inside.
A new series of these Still Lifes, here formalized in small sculptures with roses and literary references, as monuments to lost time (Proust), to the dream of no one (Rilke) to the pulverization of sight (Pizarnik).
Segments of poems, titles of books are mixed together and face in this case a red neon that warns us, through Alejandra Pizarnik’s poem, that the battle is lost. We have no choice but to watch until we are blind. This piece follows the line of “In Search of the Miracle”, Barjola Award 2022, where concepts about the romanticism of defeat are already developed.
This battle is also present in the series of watercolors ECOTOPÍAS, a long work, more than a year in development, where utopia and dystopia are related in a world full of beauty and the terrible. Through the delicate technique of watercolor, a series of images are developed and combined again with texts from the science fiction book of the same title, Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach (1975). A visionary novel, it was ahead of its time, portraying an ideal society in a world concerned about the environment.
Finally, Sala presents a series of sketches of these and other pieces that have been published in the latest issue of the prestigious Revista de Occidente to illustrate the texts of issue 501 of its edition, including those of Fernando Castro Florez and Iván de la Nuez, among others.
