LA SERIE NEGRA
Those people marked by a deep pain, a pain that makes us brothers with death and plunges us into an abyss of darkness, lead their lives in desperate intensities and carry intolerable truths for most mortals, too abstracted in the demands of everyday life. This abysmal pain is the hallmark of Damián Alquichire's "LA SERIE NEGRA", whose characters find themselves isolated from the rest of humanity after having contemplated the infinite gloom that awaits them.
Subjecting our body to pain and exposing our mind to death are experiences that illuminate like lightning the totality of time and then abandon us in a long moonless night. What we catch a glimpse of in that instant of light remains with us as an open wound. We writhe, grit our teeth, clutch our heads in anguish and stare at the earth without hope, we cry out to the sky without any response. Any passerby who walks by us turns away, fearful of discovering that our eyes have disappeared into the shadows. Even family and friends are afraid to touch us for fear of catching that incomprehensible darkness. We are left alone.
After the cries of despair we feel ashamed, we hide our gaze, we hide our wounds in an attempt to share again with others. We feel a desire to return to the herd, we want to feel welcomed by the inertia of the crowd, but an emptiness drags us into loneliness How can we get out of ourselves? There is never a true encounter with the other in these works of art.
The vision is shadowed with black spots. An oil spill, rain clouds, barren earth and coffee spilled on the book that holds our secrets. In that moment when we surrender to death and close our eyes to feel how we let go of everything, that is when we find peace and redemption. As Jules Verne wrote: “If at every instant we may perish, so at every instant we may be saved.”
Perhaps it is not necessary to wait for our last day, perhaps it is enough to close our eyes to let go of our ambitions and frustrations, to find ourselves naked and vulnerable as anyone else, enclosed in a soft penumbra, fearful, ashamed, and there in that instant in which we are profoundly human, there the light emerges.In Damián Alquichire's "Serie Negra", a ray of sunlight filters through the gloom.
Text by Ana Mardoquea.