El escombro olvidado [The forgotten rubble]

Faced with forgotten rubble, the Avilés-born Carlos Suárez once again takes a stand for memory as a means of recovering landscape, the city, vestiges and feeling. His exhibition ‘No memory. cities on the world’, which opened yesterday at the CMAE in Avilés, is a milestone in his committed career and an effective new twist in his capacity for reflection, unravelling the ruins of the past and building new emotions.

Made up of eight photographs taken in London, Madrid, Vigo and Avilés, and an installation that seeks to «shore up» the exhibition space, the show underlines the epidemic nature of the issue, setting against it monumental views of more or less recent industrial or architectural ruins. As Abel Pozuelo notes in the catalogue, Carlos Suárez’s memory «is articulated in the installation through a system of facing mirrors, so that in the photographic diptychs we can see the inhabitants of the new city, consumers in the city without memory, placed artificially beside vestiges of what was there just before, now reviled». Indeed, ‘No memory’ speaks to us of the web of transience that inhabits today’s world, of the confrontation of symbols and signs, and of the origins of cities such as Avilés itself. «Ruin as a resistance that must blow the fuses in the face of the new world’s excessive waste of energy and its destruction. A memory of more heroic times, or at least prouder and more conscious ones».

For some years now, and with greater intensity since he presented his ‘Paraísos artificiales’ at Galería Vértice and shortly afterwards won the Premio Cajastur at the Certamen de Luarca for ‘Tierras de Koningsbos’, Carlos Suárez’s photographic gaze has dispensed with any anecdotal reference and focused on the solitude of a landscape that, natural or artificial, alludes to other horizons, fleeing noise and taking refuge in new ways of looking. With a highly critical and committed accent, Carlos Suárez moves away from the Friedrich his painting carried within it to penetrate photographically into these endeavours swollen with nostalgia, amid unsettling and almost secret palpitations that are well worth discovering.

A month ago, at AlNorte 2012, the OpenLands section examined the places of uprootedness that fill our ill-treated region, with numerous examples of industrial heritage in a state of semi-abandonment. It would be no bad thing if this intelligent work by Carlos Suárez continued to explore those corners, with echoes inside and outside Asturias — cruel but evident metaphors of the instability of society and of our uncertain future.

Diario El Comercio, 16 January 2013