Curatorial text:

Parallel Worlds
Jorge Esquinca

The observer about to visit this exhibition may well wonder if, at some point, these parallel worlds -- seemingly so different from one another -- can come to touch each other. The truth is that the variety of angels imagined by José Martínez Verea, like the windows and reflections discovered by Gaal Cohen, are something more than superb photographs; they are passages, pathways to a broader reality, where all contradiction dissolves to make room for a new feeling, where the one who looks, unafraid of being mistaken, can know himself to be immersed.

Empty rooms, half-open blinds, sparks that revolve around the axis of an old chandelier suspended in the air, as if it were the last remnant of a shipwreck, a glass ship that resists sinking and keeps its lights lit in the midst of abandonment. So do the lonely and somewhat melancholy angels still revealing themselves, as if insisting on combatting our disbelief, showing themselves for brief moments in the most unlikely contexts. "The angel is that creature in whom the task we have been carrying out of the transformation of the visible into the invisible appears to be complete," wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and he added, "All the worlds of the universe are plunging towards invisibility, as well as towards their nearest and deepest reality."

Faced with a perspective like this, in which we are invited to think about the unavoidable transformation of everything, the art of photography has become the ideal means of expressing it, building bridges, forging bonds, inviting us to view with renewed awareness what exists and invisibly surrounds us. The images that José Martínez Verea and Gaal Cohen present here are the tangible example of a passionate quest.

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