The unusual length of this exhibition's title is linked to the visual power of this phrase from Juan Ramón Jiménez's book Platero and I (1914). This story is composed of brief vignettes that reflect impressions, sensations, and memories of the life of a man and a donkey in a bucolic setting. José Sanín (1990) has taken a similar approach for this exhibition in the Landscape section.
Walking, exploring, and appreciating. These verbs can describe the way we look at nature, at a horizon, at everyday and extraordinary landscapes. This exhibition can be seen as a silent journey through an environment populated by biological and synthetic elements: a frog, a satellite, an egg, some flowers. José has conceived this exhibition as an assemblage of scenes, vignettes that, when arranged together, compose a changing, silhouetted horizon, created by visible structures.
The exhibition presents stretchers of varying sizes and colors on the wall like theatrical elements, creating a play of light and shadow within the overall composition. These can be interpreted as loose fragments of a world in formation. One figure, then another, and another: the viewer's eye gradually constructs the story, associating the scenes through the possibilities of perspective offered by the pieces. Thus, by bringing to the forefront what is usually found behind the scenes—the structures that support paintings or drawings—José's work explores the material structure of the horizon it sustains. At his feet are three different benches. Each of these is developed from the study of
Wood as a material, considering its particularities and how an object can be molded to rest.
Therefore, the exhibition doesn't focus on a single idea or present a direct message. This show is more of a drift. A material gesture between canvas, wood, and light. A sensitive and open experiment, like someone who goes for a walk in the mountains and lets themselves be surprised by what appears. Like Margaret Lanterman—the Log Lady from the Twin Peaks series, a kind of landscape medium—who channels messages from another dimension through the log she holds.
Thus, the exhibition seems to evoke a classic figure from Romantic painting: that of the solitary figure who, seated on a stone, silently observes the horizon. But here, that figure does not look
The sublime is not seen from a distance, but rather inserted into a landscape made up of familiar, perhaps everyday, small, sometimes absurd, other times enchanting elements. All of this engages in dialogue with the other objects in the space—far removed from the white cube—with the clothing and items that already inhabited this space/shop where they are now placed. Ultimately, this proposal suggests another way of being in the world: one open to listening through the polyphonic dialogue suggested by the objects. The landscape is there, but it is also invented as it is observed.
