In his essay On StyleSusan Sontag comments that "every style is a means to insist on something", that more or less conscious vehicle that operates as a catalyst for individual obsessions. Of course, here we are not interested in talking about style, an exercise that, at this point, raises too many suspicions due to its presumed anchorage in the territory of forms. But we are interested in insistence as a device that pulls perception. That tells us: let's look there, to the gap, to the equivocal, to that disjointed space where reason no longer works. We want to talk, I say, about the insistence of Luis Lopez Chavez, an obstinate artist, who turns around, gropes, digs in the joints of the frame looking for clues to penetrate the crack.   

López Chávez is moved by the notion of emptiness. What is the function of this liminal structure, how does that space operate in the arithmetical layout of the city, what to do with the leftover, the pothole, the accident, how to deal with its belonging to a mechanism that appears to us as a closed continuum? López Chávez calls these semantic impossibilities "the spaces of panic". And he does so, basically, because that is what they are. Seats of a failed mechanism through which nothingness rushes. But the void, thus said, turns out to be an extremely abstract category that is difficult to approach by means of representation. In any case, he tries. It persists because vertigo does not wear out. Like a black hole, it is infinite.

Very soon, Luis realizes that the naturalistic, referential alibi is insufficient to get where he wants to go. It is not possible to "get out" of the system by repeating over and over again the same linguistic operations that close and stabilize it (that is, make it invisible). So he decides to take a pulse on common sense and insist on error, that which they call error, and which is nothing other than the sensible and conceptual limits of the real. What interests him is not to recreate the void but to install himself in its blind eye. In doing so, he points to Shklovski's premise in relation to an art whose fundamental object would be to "give a sensation of the object as vision and not as recognition". To return to the pang, that rush that is back from the place we have not yet reached.    

After several years working on the painting to the premium -or a more flexible variant to which he used to incorporate glazes, Lopez Chavez uses grisaille to develop the pieces of Los espacios del pánico. This technique will allow him to master much better the perspective of these structures in transit, to move towards painting in layers and to focus fully on the investigation of color. Before, he confesses, he was not satisfied with the results. It is hard to imagine the ways in which this discomfort would have settled in his work, especially if we take into account that we are talking about the impossible enterprise of besieging the void.