«Ruy López Opening» This is Eduardo Ponjuán’s first exhibition in Madrid. The dialogue with the European and Spanish cultural context is inevitable in this exhibition, with nods to Goya, Picasso, Fra Angelico, Caspar Friedrich, Velázquez, Van Gogh… who believed in the aesthetic delight of chess due to its ability to combine intellectual rigor with chance and play. In his words, the purity of chess is not limited to its inability to be commercialized; it extends to the movement of the pieces across the board as an expression of thought. Thought, which in Ponjuán is always projected as aesthetics, grounded in the awareness of its negative freedom (Isaiah Berlin) in the face of a world increasingly headed toward dystopias.

True to form, Ponjuán returns to his exploration of representation, with a touch of skepticism. His art analysis is marked by visual heterodoxy and an indiscriminate focus on drawing, painting, objects, or installations. His approach responds to a post-conceptual mindset, one of rationalizing the creative process, now in the service of a cynical relationship with the new “paradigm of reality” that drives the digitization, virtualization, and aestheticization of the real. A simulacrum that rests on the superiority of the false.

Sandra Sosa