(work shown above: Wesley Eberle, Center of Attention, oil on canvas, 102 x 102 cm, 2021)

Paradox

Curated by Ceres González

A dual oscillation, a journey that goes from one extreme to the other between two contradictory senses which both tense and pull at the same time: to inhabit the absurdity of life and death, love and hate, the pure and the filthy, the beautiful and the horrifying, the familiar and the ominous.

In this game of polarities we nestle, we transit in senses that affect, crush, anguish as well as in senses that alleviate, that orient our existence. 

We stand in a contemporaneity full of incongruities, we seek the subversion of our most deeply rooted beliefs and knowledge and we inquire into the ability to unveil deep questions concerning the nature of the human mind and its importance in the history of our thought.

Constituted as a rejection of doxa, Paradox is that expression that brings together “two opposing and apparently irreconcilable ideas”. This term that we could reduce to a moment of conflict in our transit towards meaning or to a simple intellectual divertimento but that persists not only in language and thought but also in many areas of art and our daily life.

While for the thinker Immanuel Kant paradoxes or antinomies have to do with a series of contradictions developed by reason when it tries to explore the properties of the Idea of the world, for the French theorist Gilles Deleuze such entities are the legitimate experience of thought (the delirium) and the founding dimension of the experience of language (meaning).

In this configuration, “Paradox”, the new exhibition at Galeria Azur Madrid aims to point out the limits of possible experience and of the exercise of reason proposed by Kant to present the unconscious as a force that escapes the judgments and representations of consciousness and for that reason allows us to think the new and the different in Deleuze’s terms, while it investigates the multiple appreciations of expression to account for a thought that is assumed as more subtle and complex.