Jesús Zurita has said and written on several occasions that the vegetative elements in his work act as a metaphor for the flesh, for the human. His landscapes of entrails force us to experience a passive genesis of consciousness that subjects us, through an empathic process, to the disturbing effect of the identical. Likewise, such a revelation draws our attention to a previous absence, which then becomes strange to us. We perceive ourselves as an “Other” that precedes and possesses us. However, that perception of the personal as an “Other” responds to the opposition between concepts as opposed as identical and strange, and it is in this context, between what causes us horror through familiarity and astonishment through unfamiliarity that the artist places us.

If we understand the skin as a boundary that separates the inside from the outside, we must interpret that everything beyond that boundary is opposed to the “Self”. The flesh, in this case, is ripe; we sense putrefaction, and there is nothing more abject than to be confronted with our own mortal condition as living beings. The fascination sparked by contemplating outside of us that which usually dwells within us—like fluids or viscera—lead us to ricochet between a pole of attraction and another pole of repulsion forced by otherness.

Like the rock paintings in the Chauvet cave, the series of four canvases that open the exhibition offer a collection of images that seem to emerge from the darkness. Some of them evoke organic forms once more in which we perceive an artificial, and thus human, imprint. The blue pigment recalls the copper oxide used in traditional Chinese ceramics to achieve a specific tonality and evokes an ancestral practice used to contain matter within its hollow. In No hay nadie. Necesariamente (There is no one. Necessarily), a snakelike luminous form comes face to face with another hidden in the shadows.