Everything human is subject to decadence

Los Bravú, a duo of Spanish artists born in 2012 from the collaboration between Dea Gómez (Salamanca, Spain, 1989) and Diego Omil (Pontevedra, Spain, 1988), embodies one of the most solid and successful artistic visions within the Spanish contemporary scene.

This statement may seem risky and somewhat presumptuous. But I subscribe to it with no intention of generating confrontation and with full awareness of my words, because few young artists today have achieved the virtuous ability to perceive the spirit of their time and turn it into a work of art that, structurally and conceptually, is as ambiguous, complex and diffuse as the cultural reality that surrounds us.

It has been five years since I had my first encounter with his works. My approach was simple and straightforward: each painting is a container where fragments of Western culture have been gathered, some pieces of the ruined building of its fundamental values, and bodies that perceive themselves alive, but that in reality inhabit the ethereal space of a -dissimulated- agony. Then I thought: this is an extraordinarily accurate analysis of the concept of beauty that we millennials handle. And I remained calm; until today.

This exhibition is a reminder that everything human is subject to decay... except imagination; it is an anthropological review of three key concepts: painting, code and mystery.

Dea and Diego come from the publishing world; their artistic research originates in the fields of philology and linguistics. They are avid readers and, always fascinated by iconography, possess a vast visual culture. This is the substantial basis of their painting: an obscene, stark, unprejudiced, decontaminated gaze. They appropriate the repertoire of classical forms and the entire Western Christian tradition without fear of submitting to the yoke of a type of beauty that today may seem distant. They also focus on bringing to light and dignifying the aesthetic remnants of the visual culture of the 90's, today owned by millennials who proudly claim to have enjoyed the last traces of the analog image. And they venture to connect with an artistic trend marked by visual hybridity and the critical reformulation of the pictorial tradition; by the coexistence and, often, the clash between the figurative -with an accent on narrative and autobiographical- and the abstract -impregnated with gestures, expansive colors and digital references-. A type of painting that no longer questions its place in the world as a language, but rather, it is dressed as a space of friction between the material image and the overabundance of virtual images.

Those who know them more closely might think that the phrase "Where the air is fresh and the flowers tremble" is a direct reference to their new studio in Orlé, in the Nalón Valley, where they have retired this past season to paint. In recent years they have made an effort to analyze, dignify and preserve the cultural imaginaries of northern Spain, that region of knowledge often located on the cultural margins. But it seems to me that these coordinates, in the quixotic style of "En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme", refer to a place far beyond the physical plane, located in the depths of the human soul. "Where the air is fresh and the flowers tremble", with great probability, launches us down the path that leads to the chaotic meadows of the unconscious.

The peculiar way in which the artists have configured this disjointed place is striking. The exhibition, at first glance, is the environment of a dream that has been paused at its juiciest and most convoluted moment. Here, text and symbols do not compete, they intertwine. There is no order or rules regarding time: past, present and future have collided. The codes of two different types of language have also collided: poetics and painting. And in between, there is a code that supports this deflagration: the language of scripting. In short, they have recreated in the gallery, through a set of detailed sprites, the dense and chaotic scenario of a video game.

The well-worn resource of the Dadaist exquisite corpse has been replaced here by a much more innovative one: the glitch. This term comes from the field of programming and is used to designate a language error that, since it does not negatively affect the performance, playability or stability of the program or videogame in question, cannot be considered a bug, but rather an unforeseen feature that can be exploited by players. Glitches arise due to badly coded or damaged files, which when read form figures or images outside the norm. One of the most widely known cases is the so-called Glitch City.

In this way, the canvas becomes a page, an inscription surface, a screen. Text and image do not compete, they contaminate each other. The visual tradition -from the Renaissance to the nineties- dialogues with the logics of the metaverse. The work is thus configured as a space of friction: a laboratory where the analog and the digital, the collective and the intimate, the sacred and the banal rub up against each other all the time.

The diegesis of these works conceals a movement of consciousness reminiscent of a quantum leap. It is neither a linear evolution nor a progressive narrative, but a collapse in which temporal and symbolic planes intertwine without hierarchy. The past is not behind nor the future in front: both are here, embedded in the present. It is in that fold where Los Bravú situate their characters, their scenarios, their texts and symbols: in the fertile chaos of a collective unconscious that has not yet found the way to narrate itself.

The color blue, omnipresent in this exhibition, accentuates this threshold character. Few shades have had a historical destiny so charged with meaning: from the ultramarine of lapis lazuli, more costly than gold and reserved in the Renaissance and Baroque periods for divinity, to its contemporary version, associated with the cold brightness of electronic screens. In the paintings of Los Bravú, blue oscillates between the mystical and the digital: it is, at the same time, prayer and glitch, sacred sky and lit monitor. In contrast to the ostentatious materiality of gold, blue is pure vibration, a sign of the intangible. The artists turn it into matter and symbol of a new collective imaginary: a blue that no longer points only to the beyond, but also to the invisible architectures of our virtual present.

At first glance, Los Bravú's painting could be read as figurative: bodies, landscapes, recognizable symbols, human gestures that seem to dialogue with the Western tradition. But to look only at the obvious would be to miss the essence of his work. Painting, in his hands, is not an end in itself; it is a means. A means to reveal, investigate and share the codes by which culture is communicated, consumed and transmitted today. Each stroke, each fragment of text, each composition is the result of a meticulous and prolonged analysis of how meanings are constructed, how imaginaries circulate and how social archetypes are perpetuated in a hyper-connected and digitalized context.

In Los Bravú, painting functions as a laboratory. Their canvases immortalize the findings of extensive research, combining iconography, linguistics, technology and collective memory. They are maps where the connections between image and text, between analog and digital, between pictorial tradition and contemporary signs are observed. Figuration serves, in this sense, as a gateway: a visual pretext that leads the viewer into a web of codes, signs and references that explain how culture is produced, interpreted and circulates today.

This strategy connects them with a line of post-conceptual artists who have investigated language and cultural systems as the raw material of the work of art. Think, for example, of Thomas Struth, who analyzes how museums and urban environments produce and reproduce cultural discourses; Tacita Dean, who works with images and media to explore memory and perception; or Mark Dion, who dissects and reconstructs systems of natural and cultural knowledge. Like them, Los Bravú are not content to show, but seek to understand, catalog and share the hidden rules that govern our experience of contemporary culture.

Where the air is fresh and the flowers tremble is, finally, an invitation to cross the blue, to lose oneself in the meadows of the unconscious, to accept that, although everything is crumbling, the inexhaustible power of the imagination still remains.

-Luis Sicre