They say the imagination evolved to detect predators. If you perceive every shadow as a beast, every pale shape as a face, and every noise as the approaching footsteps of death you are more likely to survive. We like to think we live in a world of reason, that everything can be, and is understood rationally, but we still see faces in the trees and jump at noises in the night. The artists in this show bring into focus the symbols of the imagination; creatures that exist between thought and perception.
In his paintings Jan Vallverdú shows us figures like idols, African fetishes or the demons of the circus, the heightening of imagination to the point of madness: the loss of reason, when the world becomes pure subjectivity. Francesc Ruiz Abad shows us the birds of the mind, would-be kitsch icons of the petit bourgeois, presented to us abstracted in a flurry of marks and the blue of the endless firmament. Angel de Leon jokes with us about life and death in his playfully executed and seemingly chaotic paintings, where symbols emerge: the fruit-laden tree hidden in a forest of expressive marks and a butchered carcass in a paint speckled abyss. The paintings speak to us and say "here are the fruits of life, feast on them while you may, but remember we all shall die".
In this temple of the imagination, you will be stalked by painted beasts, symbols pushing and pulling on the mind, until, at long last, we come to realise that the true beast is in us: the human animal, stripped of all pretense, that will do anything to survive.
