黑料不打烊

Javier Arce鈥檚 early output was undergirded by a concern with the popularization of the image and its instant consumption, his unease captured in a conflict with the global and reflected in the slowness of the practice of drawing. For more than a decade, ever since settling in his Pasiego hut鈥攖he opposite extreme of the global鈥攖he artist started to speak from the personal and the individual, which comes together in a single critical discourse, without detriment to the discipline of drawing, but this time also paying attention to the unhurried uses and tempered gestures of the objects and materials that surround him.

Over a century ago, the images taken by the photographer Antonio Cavilla (1867-1908) in colonial Africa (in other words, the exotic of yesteryear) were printed鈥攎ostly unattributed鈥攊n newspapers like Blanco y Negro (again, the global of back then). Part of this legacy, the portraits taken by the photographer from Gibraltar in his studio in Tangiers, are arranged in a row at the entrance to this exhibition. The models, used for calling cards, postcards or propaganda for the West and photographed with an Orientalist outlook thanks to the backdrops in his studio, are seen today against the neutral background of the gallery walls. The staged legacy of this compendium of nuanced gradations is carried over into the rest of the works in which Javier Arce intervenes, like a mechanism of superimposition for the construction of an originally hegemonic narrative which nevertheless disconcerts us when recovering the photographer鈥檚 original plates and analysing them from the more exhaustive gaze of the present.