EXHIBITION: 'GONZALO SICRE'. TOWN HALL and PEDREÑO HOUSE

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately; face the facts of life alone and see if I could learn what she had to teach. I wanted to live deeply and discard everything that was not life... So as not to realize, at the moment of dying, that she had not lived.

David Henry Thoreau

 

In the latest Amazon ad, a girl arrives in a city she doesn't know and stays in an empty rented apartment. She doesn't know anyone. She then starts watching movies on the platform, then she buys decorative objects and household items that she needs. In the seconds of the commercial the house lights up and becomes hers and only then do we see the city from her balcony. The ideal advocated by this online shipping brand is not new. At Walden Pond in Concord, Thoreau built his cabin with his hands. There he developed an idea of ​​the human being outside of society that has marked contemporary thought. In a world of hyperconnection we have recovered the old hermit as a kind of origin of a dream of isolation that allows us to be certain of having lived.

Almost all dissent occurs on some type of island, either physical or mental. That of Thomas More was Utopia, the Mysterious Island of Jules Verne can be reached by balloon, that of the writers is the kingdom of Rotonda and in the Juan Fernández archipelago there is one with the name of the most famous of the isolated, Robinson Crusoe. We could think that the island is the setting of the imagination because it is outside the control of the environment. Physical and mental isolation precedes the revelation or event.

In two exhibitions, Palacio Consistorial and Casa Pedreño, Gonzalo Sicre presents an exhaustive work on this idea of ​​isolation based on two iconic figures in this idea: David Henry Thoreau (1817 Concord, USA – 1862 Concord, USA) and Theodore Kaczynski ( 1942 Chicago, USA – 2023 North Carolina, USA) the famous Unabomber.

These two figures establish two utopias from a planned isolation in two relatively similar cabins in terms of volume, about 4 meters by 3. Sicre plays with the idea of ​​these two spaces with two paintings of an almost identical size. In these enormous formats we see two antagonistic worlds, we understand that we are talking about opposing isolations in terms of their contents. In Kaczcynski's anarchy there is a rhetoric of failure, reuse and accumulation inside to defend oneself from the outside world, it is a negative isolation. Thoreau, on the contrary, fills the emptiness of his cabin with content: a bed, a table and three chairs "One is for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." The light, elusive in Unabomber's dark cabin, streams in through confidently large windows in Thoreau's. It is a light that seems to be morning but appears on the left pointing to the recumbent chair of the man from Concord; that of society. The exterior in models, cut-outs... the container of misanthropy as a toy, as a fetish, as a narrative game and object of study.

From this idea, Casa Pedreño deepens this idea of ​​isolation in people and objects, in display cases, in small solitary paintings. Isolations and solitudes of elements “not contained in”.