Museum Hall

The work of Pedro Peña Gil (Jaén, 1978) frequently encounters the history of art or, rather, the history of artistic images. In the end, this event has been a continuous story asking about representation, the construction of the image (appearances), becoming in turn the story itself the canonical history of art, that “immobile with great steps”, as Valéry said of Zenon’s “Achilles”. Not exactly a narration of revealed clarity but, rather, a startled encounter of images with painting like someone who decides to undertake a journey in search of knowledge. Encountering the museum, public sculpture or the great monument, Peña points out how “each work remembers and celebrates the attitude of those men who revolutionized the way of seeing the world forever and how their works have stabilized in places where light once again acquires a symbolism
extraordinary. They took as their goal to search for the light, the same light that enchants us and reveals the world bathing it in colors before our eyes (...) to pay homage to the disposition that really moves us and gives meaning to existence, the capacity for wonder that will continue to fill our experience of light and color." In that aspect of pouring translucent colors over the images, some of their creations have reminded me of Max Ernst's frottage, Domínguez's decalcomanias or Tharrats's maculatures. This is because it is a frequent reinvention of
questions that thus, ad infinitum, in such tension, seem to create proposals for new meanings. Is it not known, since Warburg, that to refer to images now is to mention their transformations, impetus, displacements, experiments?

Alfonso de la Torre. Art theorist and critic, specialist in contemporary Spanish art.