A collective exhibition where Diego Kohli participates (Madrid, 1991), Javier Palacios (Jerez, 1995), Lucia Cassiraga (Valencia, 1999), Rafael Chacon (Sevilla, 1965). Wonder Secret is a small essay that addresses the possibility of how contemporary art presents variations that could be key to understanding a change in the paradigm: while the most classic part oscillates between academic figuration and “zombie” abstraction., and the most radical part—we would say—continues to stretch material values and the extreme hybridization of genres., It is possible to calmly observe how in the last four or five years the post-Internet imaginary full of video game resources has been overcome., digital errors, screens, filter extension, effect airbrush…, to give way to a different way of looking at the world that attends to other mental landscapes.
In fact, It is easy to trace in the panorama how many artists – including the four summoned here – work on the need to reveal the world and look at it from the viewpoint of the dreamlike., not realistic, of the expressive, not expressionist, of the surreal even—when a century has already passed since the First Surrealist Manifesto—, wielding disturbing images that, with a meticulous technique, they lead us to the strange, to recurring dream, perhaps because of the amazing detail, always from a sensitive figuration that handles all types of references at a formal or content level and that in its own way defends a visionary sense that faces or corrects the overwhelming reality of the media. That's why they are so different, so distant and different, but so attractive.
There is an emotion that points to the secret. There is a wonder that unfolds in the forms. The work of these four artists is that strange vision of reality that looks to the other side to reveal, if anything, the mysteries of this side. You have to think that this is one of the tasks of art, if not the most important.”
Ricardo Forriols
Polytechnic University of Valencia
