Nobleza Obliga, by Adrián Gaitán is a great living room inside a room. It is kind of an isolated area, where the drawing follows the outline of a typical sand bunker from a golf course. The room’s limits are constituted by something that seems to be an elegant wallpaper. However, just by getting closer you will notice that it is only canvas from a cheap sack. The inside floor has a rococo design made by picks and compacted soil, and there is a classic crystal lamp that is assembled with used teabags, whose color and smell give a melancholic atmosphere to the whole scene.

A green border is what joins the canvas with the floor. It is made by plants from an interior garden organized in a Versailles manner. Again, when getting near you see they are weeds, that are so common it was difficult to find their name. These actually lack a title: primrose, roof weed, brushwood that are always battled, destroyed, exterminated, but never defeated.

You can state that everything in Nobleza obliga is real: the soil, the canvas, the picks, the tea, but at the same time, everything is fake: the carpet, the walls, the tiles, the crystal. Adrián Gaitán has built a great lie with truths, but can you say that social relationships are made of something else?

The truth is bitter; lies are beautiful. In the exhibition it is evident that only what is fake needs authenticity titles, signatures, or seals: degrees, honors, art, and money. Gaitán has explored this topic time and again through a work that is surprising in the sense of matter and also, conceptually deep. However, this division seems unfair because in his work it is matter the one that is responsible for elaborating concepts.

Julia Buenaventura