LECTURAS DEL AVERNO

Lecturas del averno is an exhibition project with a documentary character, compiling a selection of explanatory representations of the classic image of hell; i.e. those that have been constructed –from modernity onwards- from the hybridisation of the intellectual legacies of the Greco-Roman world and that of Christianity. The show will consist of reproductions in three types of format, which refer to their respective mediums: five large rectangular panels, six square panels and sixteen horizontal sites dedicated to hosting small reproductions and textual annexes in a display cabinet.   Except for certain works related to the nineteenth century, the reproductions, which make up this exhibition, are contemporary representations, based  –to a greater or lesser extent- on the Western archetype of hell, that first Dante (The Divine Comedy 1304-1321) and later John Milton (A Paradise Lost, 1667) created with conceptual material taken from the Bible. Apart from its aesthetic value, the context has been selected in each case for its cartographic quality; for its being an attempt to represent an idea as deeply abstract and metaphysical as hell.   All the selected images come together via their diagrammatic quality and update old archetypes that prefigure a subterranean, telluric and in almost all cases igneous hell; a hierarchical hell about patterns given by social organisation of Western civilization in its transition towards the present. The feeling of the show is such that it is conceived as a compilation of reproduced drawing works that delve further into a purely transcendental conception of hell. They provide a certain contemporary continuity to the traditional rationalising schemes that have been conceiving of the hellish in the form of an infra-society.   On the other hand, the classical roots of the underworld described by Homer and Virgil, among others, also make themselves evident in many of the items included in the show are frequently associated with aesthetic and conceptual guidelines of a religious nature, with what could be considered as geographic fiction along with the artistic creativity and imaginative capacity of the producers of the images that are to be exhibited. This kind of trans-disciplinary approach is not only another major conceptual feature of the project, but also underlines the importance of the dialogue that these reproductions establish among themselves and the curatorial will of presenting hell as an open archetypes.     The aim of the project is to show the spectator the representational depth of a hell -or of a constellation of hells- that, far from clarifying the nature of an unearthly reality, unfailingly refer to the serious philosophical questions that have always accompanied us on the way to the obtainment of our of high culture state.   As a result, Lecturas del Averno offers an anthology of images and above all contemporary ones that think of –more or less consciously- narrating an option of a metaphysical future. They speak of our western present and past and therefore of our need to encourage  -and continue to encourage- a minimally critical way of thinking in respect to ourselves as individuals and as a community and when considering the big questions that, at least, immediately after the show will not have been answered.