Los bienaventurados, 2022 - Xavier Arenós

Los bienaventurados, 2022xarenos2025-03-29T09:57:50+00:00

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Los bienaventurados, 2022

160 x 300 x 530 cm.
Wood, metal pins, photographs.

The installation Los bienaventurados (The Blessed) is made up of four forks supporting several planks arranged in the shape of a cross. Thirty-three photographs of craftsmen and craftswomen whose silhouettes have been cut out of wood have been placed on their axes (1). In order to highlight the anonymous craftsmanship, the faces of the figures have been perforated.

The arrangement of the planks and their shape become important in the installation, as they can be interpreted as a Christian cross, a crossroads or even a constructivist composition. They can also be perceived as shelves holding up a world that no longer exists and that contrasts with our own: hyper-productive and hyper-accelerated. To this end, the holes in the faces of the figures have been placed at eye level to allow viewers to see through them.

In the introduction to the book Los bienaventurados by María Zambrano, from which the title is taken, it is stated that ‘blessed is the happy person, happy with what is and with what there is’. This ‘original feeling’ together with austerity, suffering, resilience and hardness can be seen in the characters in the photographs. According to the Spanish philosopher, this feeling that ‘comes from within’, comparable to the mystical experience, suggests that ‘through passivity, silence or suffering one can reach a radical, metaphysical and transcendent knowledge that can even lead to the revelation of the sacred’.

(1) The photographs are taken from several books on Spanish folk crafts from the 1970s and 1980s. These books were produced by photographers such as Català Roca, Armengol and Natacha Seseña, among others, with the aim of documenting the last manual crafts before they were completely lost. These visual testimonies are complemented by texts by Artigas, Corredor-Matheos and Mª Antonia Pelauzy.

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Exhibition:
Anidar en el gesto: unas estanterías de Alberto.
Curatorship: Ángel Calvo Ulloa
Cerezales Foundation. Cerezales del Condado, León. From 18 December to 2 April 2023.