Images, inevitable companions of human development. Ideas that take the form of objects to become goods for exchange and propagation. Carved wood, polished stones and cast metals function culturally to institute community relations. They have acquired value to exercise commercial transactions, organize great societies or represent unattainable divine beings; but all this in exchange for taking the same life as that of their creators. What do objects have to share our world?

Within this entropy, artist Alex Gambin investigates and chooses an intersection crossed by the heterogeneity that reflects this debate: the transfers of artistic objects, including those from the Prado Museum collection, in the face of the Spanish Civil War; a plan to keep away the fire that seemed to threaten to drag everything into oblivion. Are these objects cultural heritage or representations of power? Throughout this exhibition proposal, all kinds of administrative strategies in favor of a self-styled exercise of prevention are compiled. Through drawing, the artist traces large packaged figures, cars, trucks or people typing relentlessly. A titanic device of archival instrumentalization against the clock that Gambín fragments. A recollection of the ghosts of war that threatens the loss of images.

These struggles have caused rivers of ink to flow long before the iconoclastic proclamation of the Council of Hieria (754), answered by the iconodulism of the Second Council of Nicaea (787), a battle for the need of representation. The possibility of the age of the image of the world was opening up, the pursuit to understand the mediation of imaginaries; to observe how beliefs were embodied by constructing hegemonies, pieces that contained political and cultural ideologies. Objects that are protected to safeguard the implicit heritage that sighs from within, collections that converge in a myriad of constellations that structure our historical records; materials transformed into paintings, sculptures, tapestries, books or any surface capable of speaking for itself. It is in this frenetic movement that Gambín analyzes the images that interpret objects. Why do these works arouse so much veneration? What lies behind the magnitude of these transfers during the Spanish conflict? The false promises of perpetuating the immortality of a culture in spite of everything. We have accepted a visual economy that endows these collections with all the incalculable value of protecting our appearances, of defending the forms in which we project ourselves as societies. This is how prophecies are fulfilled: by shaking hands with stone, fire and wood. The exhibition shows how objects speak of our ways of sharing this world, whispering that images have become more real than ourselves.