Álvaro Barcala. Artwork: 2009

Álvaro Misterio - Cosmic Toys
From July 4 until July 27, 2009

Opening: July 4, 2009 at 6 p.m. - 10 p.m.

enblanco is pleased to announce the exhibition „Cosmic Toys“ by Álvaro Misterio.

In his series “Cosmic Toys" (Juguetes Cósmicos) Álvaro Misterio combines two of his ever-prevailing topics: childhood and the world of myth and cosmology.

The eight drawings of the series each show a child or girl enthralled in a play of sorts. Dolls, play bricks, plants and everyday objects found in every household – a pen, a knife, a mirror and lipstick - become part of a sequence of settings, which evoke classical religious rituals such as human sacrifice or spiritual invocation. Rituals, which stem from the time when we first chose to create gods as a means to understand the world which surrounds us.

Children have a way of their own to perceive the world and to make the world make sense to them, believes the artist. From their perspective, playing is not simply a way to imitate something or someone, in the way of creating a fake or a fake world, but a means to interpret and understand reality. A reality, which can be incomprehensible and illogical and forces the individual to look for explanations in his or her own imagination and not only in the often unsatisfying rules, laid out by someone else. Children as such still have to learn societies rules – one of the reasons the artist is so drawn to them.

But while a doll, which is taken apart, for the child can remain a doll – a plaything, a mechanism to investigate - to the onlooker it can become more than an object. We can’t help to associate plastic limbs, modeled on the human body, with precisely this body which is vulnerable to pain and death. So when these limbs get scattered, we find it disquieting.
The boundaries between the human body and its moulded copy seem to blurr even more, when suddenly a doll’s open skull shows a brain, half scattered on the floor, while the actual girl has no eyes but instead the hollow and dead sockets of a doll.

The uncanniness experienced while looking at these drawings though, is not related to any explicitely violent depiction. ‚Violence’ – says Barcala – is in people not in the object or an artwork’. The spectators fulfill the scene as they create their own story around each picture and thus any perceived violence may stem from their imagination alone. While the drawings themselves remain metaphores for the incomprehensible ways in which we try to make sense of an incomprehensible world.

His works have been shown in the last two years in galleries like Knot & Krüger (Berlin), Fastcool (Madrid) and Galerie 21 (Hamburg).

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