HARMONY AND CHANCE IN HÉCTOR ZAMORA'S EMERGENCIA

The central piece phagocytizes by its strength and disposition and breaks the scheme of unity. Or apparently. Some ceramic vessels are piled up in the lower part of the gallery. Some still retain their integrity, but others are affected by the passage of chance, of the out of control. Whoever finds himself in front of them without knowing the previous process, where some thirty actors executed a piece in which the pottery passed from hand to hand, accelerated, running a chain of fortune and challenging the inevitable breakage, could err on the side of some other reading of the language of Zamora, and surely valid. 

We find ourselves facing the next evolution in the work of an artist who also greatly values the symbolism of brick and fired clay as material and artistic elements. In the last twenty years, Zamora has already used on occasion the circulation and manipulation of these objects by chains of people, delving, as on this occasion, into the concepts of construction, imagination and interconnected —and even collaborative— society.

Let's start from the premise that live art lacks the formalism that is presupposed in the spatial aspect of less ritualistic art and that, hence, the need for documentation arose. Without entering into the debate on whether the archive and its forms are artistic expressions in themselves, the artist leaves a testimony beyond the actual recording and subsequent exhibition of the performance. The result of the action remains and does so in a physical way, it does not evaporate, and marks the average within that balance between harmony and chaos, construction and destruction, indicating which part of that struggle of concepts stands as the winner or, if we do not want to apply a sportlike language, which of those will transcend.

The exhibition is complemented by some other pieces that maintain fired clay as a formal nexus, although the static dynamics of the piece that lies on the lower floor may end up as the only one in the memory. There is no illusory deception, for L'oeuf de vie delves from the geometric into the sacred and the totemic, into that almost innate reverence of any work exhibited in a museum environment and that proposes new visions on the functionality of space and the reinterpretation of the scale of values. Poralia accesses the confrontation with the rational and geometric, mathematical and tangible of materials and their qualities, which he challenges with hyperbolic paraboloids that, paradoxically, seem to have found their organic essence.

Emergencia. Héctor Zamora can be seen until October 26th at Albarrán Bourdais, Barquillo, 13, Madrid (Spain).