After confinement for nearly two years, Gabriel Macotela exorcises death by uttering the survivor’s prayer: the song of those who risk knowing their own darkness and invite the lights of their existence. The factory of devastation contemplates the landscapes after the battle, still smudged with ash and mortuary frost, fragments reality into still lifes that had never before conquered such a name so hard, mercilessly portrays the looks and features of those who mocked the stalking of the black heralds, the attacks of the executioners, the omens of the heavenly messengers… presided over by the archangel Jophiel studded with ambers and quartz.
Drawings, models, paintings, and engravings, weave the chronicle of these sorrows that refuse to disappear. They do it, the territories of their always memorable compositions and of an endearing depth, through vigorous gestures, and impetuous strokes. Vitalistic creations that are waves of indignation and beauty, cries for justice, wrapped in the flight of an aesthetic harmony that transcends calamities, defying the apocalypse. And although he assumes the mean maxima culpa of the Confiteor, expressing the fatigue that we have provoked in nature and the unease that we spread among ourselves, aimless atoms, he retains an ember of hope, a minimum detachment from Elpis, the only deity that refused to abandon Pandora when she opened and emptied of evils and fears the container synonymous with temptation and curiosity…
Gabriel Macotela fights the silence, he does it without saying a word. His images are eloquent, they are dressed in ideas. They are soliloquies in search of dialogue, they pursue the feelings of others, they meet the thoughts of others, and they share the imagination of others. Against the evidence of reality, those tragic residues that smear us with the ointment of pessimism, the maker of subversive, perhaps disturbing, fictions, challenges ignorance, good consciences to a duel, denounces the violence of the powerful, the bad milk of the faint-hearted, and makes him aware that the enemy continues to win. That does not frighten him, perhaps even motivates him to a kind of heroic immolation.
LUIS INGANCIO SAINZ
