🖼️ Gallery Visit: Carlos Aires at Sabrina Amrani
Exploring an impactful show at one of the best galleries in South Madrid's Carabanchel.
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We had stopped by Sabrina Amrani because Roberto Rivadeneira had passed along a few recommendations of where to go and who to visit while we were in Carabanchel, a southern neighborhood that felt very working class, like the space between Poble Nou and Badalona in Barcelona, Queens in New York, or Glendale in Los Angeles. Like all of these areas, artists are popping up and taking over spaces, which also means gallerists are popping up too — and they’re often expressing the most exciting and most interesting artistic ideas.
Sabrina’s gallery was no exception but different in that the way her gallery is arranged is a one-two trick of offering a cozy space that then expands into something akin to a François Ghebaly or Night Gallery: a giant gallery space that makes possible the whims of most artists. Space is no issue! But you might miss that, if you didn’t know where to look.
The reason why we stopped by was because, on Instagram, there was a spectacular display of paper lamps arranged in rows that turn the “viewing space” to the ceiling. In walking in, that wasn’t there: it was a short, L-shaped room where a triptych of stood before you as if an altar. Various tender from around the world were cut out into gothic letters, arranged in stanzas, explaining concepts like having sex and dying. It all made sense, something between an essay and a poem, but the reference wasn’t clear — not at least to us. Tucked further in were music sheets which made the statement at the front more clear: it was The Doors’ 1967 song “The End.” The sheets were screenprinted delicately in a crimson, or deep red-brown. A front page for the sheet music depicted an eye as if removed from the skull but attached to everything that made the eye “work.” The title of the song hung above, stately, in a serif font.
Bobby and I thought that was it and were going to leave, I turning to my phone to see if there was maybe another entrance that we had missed.
“Are you here for the show?” a woman asked us, in a black robe lined with a white trim. We were, we explained. Then, without any further pleasantries outside of where we were from and why we were in town, she proceeded to walk us through the work. The song, she explained, was a Jim Morrison creation that was made between his being in reality and his descending into an LSD haze, the resulting lyrics challenging power and love, life and death. The music sheets, she pointed out, were screen printed with the blood of the artist, Carlos Aires. It was a statement on how the blood of queer people is so taboo, so symbolic of death and “the bad” that somehow goes beyond the typical disgust that comes with blood. By printing the music so cleanly, by pointing out its ties to ends, the statement was fairly obvious how one was to connect the two subjects being placed together.
Then, down a small hallway, she took us behind a curtain — and into the room with the lanterns, that I had been looking for. The lanterns were strung up on a grid that felt connected to the structure of the building. On each lantern was printed with an image, from the face of Donald Trump to Hitler, Italian police to children playing, people screaming to Black Lives Matters protestors. Images appeared twice but there were thousands: you’d be there for quite some time before you found a pair — or the faces of orgasm, which Sabrina noted Carlos had added into the mix. Then, as she was explaining all of this to us, the lights turned off — and we and her and the other viewers who had gathered around for her speech — were in the dark, together but without any sight of each other. There were no emergency lights and pinheads of light coming from the ceilings. Besides the light of a woman looking at her phone, it was impossible to see anything, which was the point: the show was called BLIND.
She explained that the artist had a friend who committed suicide, that the friend had left a note and hoped that friends could get together and remember them and listen to the 2008 Hercules & Love Affair song “Blind.” The song is melancholic, joyous yet sad, disco made for crying on the dancefloor, as Anohni sings about loneliness, about aging and hoping to find brightness in life despite constantly feeling like there is no help out there. “I feel like I,” she sings. “I am blind.” This, as Sabrina explained, collided with the artist having an eye surgery and, due to his own sleepwalking, he nearly blinded himself and had to have repeated surgeries to treat the issue. These situations of tragedy and terror, friendship and its opposite, drain the light from life. So, for a full minute every three minutes the lights in the gallery went dark, feeling like you were spending hours and hours and hours in the unknown, as if someone might grab you or as if the space itself might shift.
At the end of the gallery was another triptych, all silhouettes on the blackest of black paint (but not Anish Kapoor’s black). The middle featured the continents of the world which were framed, to the right, by various public figures and persons of our time, the good and the bad but mostly the bad. At left, all the good, all the pleasure: people having sex, sex toys, cartoon characters, works of art, animals. The figures were placed in ovals, to create the feelings of a mirror. Sabrina pointed out, in the far right of a work, was a swastika. “I can’t show this work in my home country, in France,” she explained. “That would be illegal.” She laughed. “I told Carlos that I am not risking my livelihood for him.” She concluded the tour not long after this, all of us laughing as the lights turned off for the fifth or sixth time, this time us huddled near these faux-mirrors.
Rarely do you get to tour a show with an artist or a gallerist — but rarely do you get a tour of a gallery with a gallerist that is as thorough and comprehensive as we were able to get. It was by complete chance, lucky stars aligning on our journey. It also illustrated something that’s easy to forget “in these times”: the inclination is to see something and go, to speedrun, to do it on your own and ask no questions — which is what we would have done. But in that stopping and speaking with someone, in sharing a moment and really taking the time to offer an ear, you really do see and get so much more out of an experience. This was a good lesson to get during a tour of galleries and fairs and studios, a time when your eyes can feel fatigued by beauty, by information. Why not take things slower? Why not enjoy what someone is trying to say to you versus trying to race past them, trying to do it all on your own? A fitting lesson for these times.
Follow Sabrina Amrani on Instagram and learn more on their website.