AD AETERNUM

Ad aeternum is the third stage a single project project that encompasses two previous phases as the exhibitions “UTOPOS / DISTOPOS” and “Perdido para siempre lo perdido”.

A work that started from the study of a wide range of utopian proposals that the human being has put forward throughout history, as well as their links with their dystopian reflection in contemporary society. Plato’s Republic, early Christianity, or the closest ideological trends of the 19th century, such as utopian socialism and communism, distorted in a socio-political fate that filled the 20th century with totalitarianism and warfare. This trend has already been theoretically approached from different standpoints by theorists such as Popper, Oakeshott, Hayek, or Marcuse.

While aiming for a plastic result that would look into the possible connection points between two questions, two main ways of representation were chosen: on the one hand, the Renaissance –the moment when Thomas More’s novel Utopia appears, numerous urban studies that project the search for the “ideal city” are carried out or the conical perspective turned into an illusory tool in the pictorial field is discovered– as a utopian paradigm; on the other hand, a selection of diverse contemporary cities –mainly from the Middle East for its architectural sobriety and austere chromaticism– devastated by wars as a dystopian paradigm. Around these two axes, the works that make up this project and, consequently, this exhibition were born.

In some cases, the Renaissance aesthetic –represented through colourful geometric floors and a marked perspective– is complemented by warlike landscapes –compositively more anarchic and chromatically more basic– thus generating a space where both concepts coexist and, somehow, they give rise to a third variant, an apparently illusory space that symbolises the perpetual coexistence of those two attitudes that the human being has maintained throughout much of its history: the one of “building” from the field of ideas and the other to “destroy” in an effort to put them into practice; in further cases, both aesthetics are contrasted, as in the artwork “AD AETERNUM” that lends its name to the exhibition: reinterpretations of various Renaissance paintings with a marked symbolic character are juxtaposed with various landscapes or elements of war in an idea of both visual as conceptual confrontation.

It is on the basis of these ideas that a work that continually generates new secondary ways of reflection is developed –the nature of the human being, his contradictions and his tools to assume and justify them or the new global formulas to achieve a more “just” society– that requires new plastic formulations. As a result of all of this, the work AD AETERNUM arose, a phase of the project that covers the last two years of work, now presented as an exhibition at Sala Parés.