Cámara Bufa Hall, Toledo. (From April 2 to May 5, 2021).
This exhibition begins with a passage from Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, in which Horacio observes La Maga. The scene evokes two different ways of being in the world: the one who swims through rivers unknowingly —like the swallow that launches itself into the air without calculation— and the one who pauses to watch, to analyze, to try to understand from a distance. Between these two modes, a space of tension opens — but also one of encounter.
The works collect here —five drawings, two large-format paintings, and a canvas bearing the quoted text— do not illustrate this scene, but rather expand it and translate it into the visual.
The bodies depicted —female couples, intimate and affective bonds, a man in a skirt— embody alternative ways of being, of looking, and of relating. There is no dramatization of the extraordinary here, but rather a quiet affirmation of identities and desires that have often been excluded from the center of representation. Nudity, in this context, is not a reference to the classical artistic nude, but to the possibility of being seen without filters, through a shared trust.
The lines —sometimes tentative, sometimes confident— give rise to images where what is visible coexists with what is barely suggested. The direct stroke, the lack of embellishment, and the empty space —not as absence, but as a margin of possibility— support a poetics in which the closeness between bodies is also a form of thought.
Far from offering a closed interpretation, this exhibition proposes a way of approaching images that echoes Cortázar’s idea: to look without needing to fully understand, to be affected by what appears without imposing meaning. In doing so, the work invites us to ask: from where do we look? What kind of presence do we embody? Do we dive in, or do we remain on the shore?