Profecías incompletas embodies a kind of melancholy, a weighty melancholy that inevitably grows dense: we see into the murky shadows. Pablo Mora's aesthetic daring is the promise of images we cannot see, the seduction of penetrating the beautiful (perhaps sublime) darkness held forth by 20th-century paraphernalia and the vestiges of western culture. We face a myth created by the artist; it is the history that before our very eyes becomes nebulas and veiled horizons, sinking ruins. This exhibition is a fiction-archive, but it is also the unanswered question that arises before the truth of the word, of discourse written, read and uttered. It is the fragmented writing that "makes an image" of unspeakable time. It is a poetic list, the inventory of a world, the delirium of meaning making.
Pablo Mora has catalogued and numbered 2,500 boxes of slides arbitrarily inscribed under categories derived from his insatiable readings. The austere containers arranged in closed display cases promise a content based on their imprecise and incomplete placement, like an authentic disarray that excites the viewer's imagination, giving rise to a desire for an attainable image. To see, to read and to feel this installation provokes other readings of the world and implies wandering between "word images" that seem as familiar as they are strange; it confronts us with the very uncertainty of our current era and the instability of unsettled spirits. For their part, the paintings annul the romantic idea of landscape with their resplendent darkness by emulating the incomplete prophecy upon which modernity was founded: a terrible, radiant fantasy.
There is no triviality in the artist's use of rhetorical figures like "the noises of progress," "the metaphysical temperaments," "the bastardized reasonings," "the lost aesthetics," "the neoliberal laboratories," "the lugubrious speeches," and "the manifestations of brutality." This project has emerged from deep, silent reflection; from the inability to find repose amidst a voracious, corrupt world; from thinking through other "thinkers;" from dressing the table with ideas from a century that won't end; from the eternal, recalcitrant presence of voices that harbor kindness and malice, naiveté and hubris; and, most importantly, it attests to an attachment to the words that have been spoken and the discourses that uphold and topple the world.
"It is all a chaos of nothing"
Fernando Pessoa
