Museum Hall

The work of Pedro Peña Gil (Jaén, 1978) frequently encounters the history of art or, rather, the history of artistic images. After all, 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 strides", as Valéry said of Zenon's "Achilles". It is not exactly a narration of revealed clarity, but rather a startled encounter of images with painting, like someone who decides to embark on a journey in search of knowledge. Encountered with the museum, the public sculpture or the great monument, Peña points out how "each work recalls 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 an extraordinary symbolism
. They took as their goal to search for light, the same light that bewitches 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 of astonishment that will continue to fill our experience with light and color". In this aspect of spilling translucent colors on the images, some of his creations have reminded me of Max Ernst's frottage, Dominguez's decalcomanies or Tharrats' maculatures. This is a frequent reinvention of
questions that thus, ad infinitun, in such tension, seem to create proposals of new meanings. Is it not known, since Warburg, that to refer now to images is to mention their transformations, impulses, displacements, experimentations?

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