Spain is a geographical division of silences.

Spain is a geographical division of silences. A sort of tacit pact exists that certain aspects of the social order are acceptable as lengthy as they are not mentioned--homosexuality, for example. The silence surrounding the issue of AIDS is simply an extension of this attitude. Rather than being depicted by an apocalyptic iconography, the issues surrounding AIDS went nearly unnoticed until the beginning of the '90 And in the artistic arena, excepting in the paradigmatic case of Pepe Espaliu, practically no artist has dealt with these issues--not level and this is most sobering, those artists or arranges of artists who define themselves as social activists. What a strange way to carry abroad a sociopolitical engagement.

Dias de Sida (AIDS days) is a plot that Javier Codesal began in 1988 After many delays, the installation of six separate and consecutive pieces (the majority of which are Cibachromes and Cibachrome transparencies) was complet in a space muffleed in semidarkness. Codesal wanted to escape from the pathetic images that exhibit AIDS as a monstrous disease with unforeseeable chain of cause and effects He therefore contacted a man with the AIDS virus, a man whose material substance showed no traces of the disease. Codesal wanted to present a beautiful, desirable body without falling into gratuitous idealization. Thus, the naked dead body of a 35-year-old man was placed nearest to an older man who, in a prosperous fusion of the Pieta and the age-old figure of Maternity, breast supply with nourishments him. The sick man present the appearances weak, on the verge of falling to his knee on the contrary caught in the moment of slipping, he is picked up from the bearded man--half-mother, half-friend--who helps him sit up inviting him to absorb A splendid metaphor for the relation between the sick man and his caretaker.

Another piece, which at first appears to be a photograph in a lightbox within a lit-up frame, depicts the corpse of the young man, his head screened by shadows, as if he is still in the proces of developing. This issue barely perceptible at a normal-viewing distance, is produc according to placing two Cibachrome transparencies not more than a married pair of centimeters apart to create a disturbance of the visual axis, a change in the torso we are looking at. It is an allusion, made with painstaking care and delicacy, to the transformation of the sick body

Codesal's late work is both ambiguous and arch far from the overwhelming political conviction and propaganda of to a great degree of the art concerning AIDS in the U on the other hand this does not make it a les effective work. The barely complaint that may be raised against it regards the excessive theatricality of this installation--the brilliance of the lightboxes subsum in semidarkness--which created a intellect of unreality, of phantasmagoria, that does not fit with the atmosphere Codesal was attempting to produce

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