With Ignacio Llamas’ new project, Lo que la luz encubre, where the artist moves forward in his reflections about silence, sound, the immaterial and the material, light and shadow, hidden beauty… ever-present in his fictitious microcosms, created to show a new physical reality before our eyes. Lo que la luz encubre leaps from unreal to real, and the landscape, which is shown as fictitious, as a daydream, is almost a “model” of an existing place that Llamas found in the summer of 2019.

As the artist explains “… I had the opportunity to visit a unique place nature had generated. A few years before, a landslide had taken place in the thick of a forest crossed by a river and it had blocked it, creating a small lake. As a consequence, part of the forest was flooded and a clearing emerged in the middle of the flourishing of life”.

Lo que la luz encubre is the title of the visual proposal arising from the approach to that woodland in the village of Cornilo, in Italy. Wondering there he discovered, once more, that nature shows the close relationship between light and shadow, between life and death, and the way that connection can reach astounding degrees of beauty. Rather than documenting the place, Llamas reflects on those assotiations, shedding light on how the concept of beauty is modified by the proximity of what is not nice, kind or balanced. And how that pollution with ugliness makes it sublime.

In the exhibition, apart from the photographs in this new series, the installation Vaciamientos made up of 21 cardboard boxes covered with concrete, in different sizes and laid in line, will be presented. Llamas materializes the concept of identity. Metaphorically, the box ( the human being ) loses its function / role ( its identity ) of container of objects as it is coated and filled with concrete. This work allows for reflection on the identity of the human being, how it is built and destroyed, how it is linked to appearance rather than the true essence of each individual. The installation, about 13 metres long, has also got the function of interacting with the site, making it inaccessible unless through it.

Both in the series Lo que la luz encubre and the installation Vaciamientos Llamas works with the dualism of opposing concepts: in-out, superficiality-essence, positive-negative, profit-loss or destruction-regeneration ( destruction of an imposed, false identity as an essential process of rebuilding a real identity)