Pablo Carpio

Sedimented Silences is Pablo Carpio’s (1979, Madrid) second solo show at Mirat. The exhibition charts the artist’s original speculations upon the urban space and its evolutions in a distant future.

Inspired by the layered memories of metropolitan outskirts around the world, Carpio innovatively engages with painting as a non-human means of expression, revealing the poetics of abandonment in contemporary cities.

Having previously investigated the many becomings of painting and the three-dimensionality of the medium overwhelming the canvas, Carpio’s work is taking a new turn. The artist questions the post-industrial landscape around his studio, revealing the becoming-painting of the space we inhabit, the floors we step on, the walls we cross.

Carpio combines a variety of materials, both industrial and organic, meeting the randomness of matter with his own physical resistance and the strain of his building tools. His artistic interaction with the inert brings our attention to what will never be given voice, what endures throughout its own quiet fading.

On the periphery of our perception dwell non-human tales of all kinds, retaining in their own flesh the sediments of a marginal history. These fragile modes of persistence testify for post-human worlds. How will time appropriate what is left behind in the centuries to come? For now, Carpio’s hypothesis of an art without man requires a different gaze on our immediate surroundings.

With this exhibition Carpio opens an interstice of silence where the artist’s hand gives way to the imperceptible. The profound depth of colour that he presents us, upsets our categories of perception. A non-anthropocentric aesthetic is proposed, where the painting interrogates its own future. It addresses us as an unsolved problem that requires to remain so: how will art exist in the world we abandon? Working with paint-as-matter, pushing, falling, breaking, waiting and doing it all over again for a future layer, Carpio explores art as a never-ending process, a memory that is always about to be covered up.