Living together, alone 

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In the space that is assembled between one painting and another, on the tangent of that vanishing edge, the singular temporality of an isolated cohabitation and a space open to questions float: with whom do we live in extreme solitude? What is tracing the intimacy of a suffocation? And the suffocation of intimacy? Is breathing a singular form of being together with? Would there be in the conspiracy a field of sensitive imagination in which to think about ways of living together, and no?

In this exhibition, Sebastián Camacho paints portraits, of intimate people, yes, but also -or above all-, he portrays a time, a time of disorientation of breaths and gazes; an absurd time of minimal gestures impossible. Open windows on scenes of inner life, a domestic life missed by the bags that cover the face with that particularly disturbing mixture of delicacy and danger, reveal an intimacy (in pijamas) radically exposed in a painting, thus checking the border that supposedly separates “inside” and “outside”.

 

When we breathe, the smallest alveolus of the lung is exposed to air that enters from the "outside world". This continuous gesture, mostly unconscious, that sustains our life, subtly blurs, every minute, the limit between me and the world, with its more or less threatening air. When we breathe, too, something is suspended; between an expiration and the following inspiration, a small suspense. An air of pause that does not stop the movement, rather allows it to continue, and allows us. Thus, simply, in the breath -in the painting- something is sustained.

 

Sustaining in an exhibition the timeless gesture of portraying loved ones, perhaps less to fix them in memory or to retain them in the frame, than sustaining the temporality of a moment by stretching it on the canvas, in each minute brushstroke. Painting as a ritual of attention, from all the muscle fibers of the arm, of the hand that holds the brush, and of the eyes that -I imagine- travel between a photo, the image in process and get lost in the wandering that try to recompose the image of a loved one.