Futuro suspendido [Suspended future]

In recent years Carlos Suárez (Avilés, 1969) has been working with concepts such as displacement, border, memory and identity, creating an archive of images structured in series, with a transgressive and critical intent, taking on a commitment to landscape as context and material, reflecting on the relationship between the social and the geographical, with a vision close to dystopia. On this map, the search for vague territories, for routes that approach limits, for the traces and wounds we leave on the landscape, defines a wandering through settings in different countries — Spain, Belgium, Romania — using the language of photography to investigate liquid spaces from which poetic, social and political records are drawn.

The piece “Timeless City” should be understood as a continuation of the cartographies and mappings of territory the artist has been producing, a catalogue of “hot spots — as Smithson might say — of a land that has forgotten time”. Based on photographs taken in Castilla y León, in housing developments such as Los Balagares (Corvera de Asturias), in various parts of Galicia, and at the Seville Universal Exposition and the Zaragoza International Exposition devoted to water and sustainable growth, this project is characterised by the hybridisation of text and image, building a discourse from the “Programme élémentaire du bureau d’urbanisme unitaire” (1961) by Attila Kotányi and Raoul Vaneigem and the “Formulary for a New Urbanism” (1958) by Gilles Ivain. But text had already been forcefully incorporated in his series “Promesas de Bucarest”, shown in the group exhibition “Espacios de memoria” (2012) at the Gloria Heldmound gallery: photographs of the “Palace of the People”, from whose balconies the dictator Ceaușescu gave, on 21 December 1989, what would be his last populist harangue, some of whose words appear in the images.

This exhibition has been organised around the edition of “Timeless City” — screenprints plus digital printing on paper, produced by Fernanda Álvarez in the Factoría Cultural workshops — and it confirms the changes printmaking has undergone, having moved beyond traditional supports and techniques. Carlos Suárez — trained in lithographic printing at the Frans Masereel Centrum workshops (Kasterlee, Belgium) — expands the work into space, seeking a dialogue with the architectural elements through a large piece (4.30 × 4.30 m) that dominates the whole room: a background painted grey on which the title of the show is lettered in orange. Four images of marginal territories with conclusive texts — wonderful place, no return — complete a narrative about the degradation of territory at the hands of a speculative economy that sustained the property bubble. They are landscapes empty of movement and life, although human traces and signs are present: the assaults on the environment in which we are implicated as viewers with no response.

To ask, therefore, whether critical resistance is still possible is to confront a suspended and uncertain future, like those roads that carried the promise of bringing us closer to the paradise of idyllic housing developments and yet have been left unfinished, leading nowhere, flooded by oblivion.

Timeless City. Carlos Suárez. Factoría Cultural de Avilés. (Published in La Nueva España on 22 April 2015)