New book – SANTIAGO TALAVERA
13.04.2024
"Hauntopolis. Teatro del fin del mundo"
You already have available the catalogue of the last exhibition of our represented artist, Santiago Talavera, inaugurated in the Nave Sotoliva on the 14th of March. The artist offers us his proposal "Hauntopolis. Theatre of the end of the world" in this edition. Between paradise and dystopia, the cartography of Hauntopolis spreads across the walls of Sotoliva in search of a glimmer of hope, evoking the capacity of art not only to raise awareness of the problems of our time but also to imagine a better future. His high quality images offer the experience of looking at the photographs in the room, or being surprised by the most subtle details of the works. The texts by Fernándo Castro Flórez that accompany them, unravel the different interpretative threads that they arouse in us. Constructing his discourse on the basis of statements by the artist himself, supported by a solid bibliographical corpus, Castro Flórez offers us stimulating reflections, such as those presented below:
When History seems obsolete or a mere spectral repertoire, when the dismantling of the public sphere by neoliberal selfishness has been consummated, it is difficult to recover the critical impulse and it may even seem that the utopian is absolutely forcluded. Horror vacui operates in Santiago Talavera's work as a reaction to that history in pieces. [...] Santiago Talavera points out that every landscape is a collective portrait and, in his case, what he shows us is sinister (in the Freudian sense, something familiar that has become strange due to repression) as in those drawings by Santiago Talavera in which putrid bodies appear.
