TOWARDS MIGUEL ÁNGEL ROJAS' QUIEBRAMALES
Two decades after Miguel Ángel Rojas (1946, Bogotá, Colombia) conceptualized in his project David Quiebramales his denunciation of violence and the use of education as the most efficient vehicle towards a catharsis for those who suffer it, the Madrid headquarters of La Cometa revisits his most emblematic work and reinterprets it as the framework for a kind of thematic retrospective. This commemoration of that first David Quiebramales reinforces a view that is still difficult to overcome and that, even today, serves to trace those harmful social dynamics that are created between society and war, the institutional and the political systems.
The piece on which the exhibition revolves is meant as a plea in favour of reintegration, but not only in what is socially commonly accepted, but also in terms of canonical aesthetics. Nevertheless, his fortuitus meeting in 2004 with soldier Ramos, an antipersonnel mine-mutilated by war, became a chance conceptual representation of that incompleteness key to construct his denunciation. Taking the Renaissance sculpture par excellence, this incomplete David points to a past of social inequality, but also to a redemptive future through education that he will once again claim in Primaria.
In this similar approach, the room is completed with the installation Quiebramales (2004-2024), the materialization of this word made with graphite pencils, and whose disposition on the floor under the photographs of its matrix leads to conceptually linking the popular lexicography with the purpose of the object, this education that Rojas highlights as instrumental (also in Lee y multiplica (2013-2019), two mathematics and writing notebooks lined with mambe, also exhibited) and that stands as the primary tool that will erase the systemic errors of society and the economy that have been maintained for so many decades.
Quiebramales, by Miguel Ángel Rojas. Until April 20. La Cometa Gallery. San Lorenzo 11, Madrid, Spain.
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