NOMEOLVIDES 

Perhaps in the skin of things, in what is still between them and us, we will find the senders of our lost letters, the words we couldn’t say. Through a particular narrative that is simultaneously visual, textual, and performative, Carlos Herraiz establishes intimate relationships between anonymous archives recovered from various forms of oblivion. His practice as a walker-gatherer of abject objects leads him in his walks to spaces of forgotten memories in the open air, unnoticed storage spaces sprouting on the sidewalks of Barcelona’s industrial outskirts, lost property offices founded in trash bins, waste dumps that no one will ever claim. The artist points out the aura of the remains, bending down before the excess—which he rather sees as a lack—before what is left of other people’s memories, perhaps to make them his own, so as not to forget them.

His exploration of these unknown “omissions of memories” is conducted through a profound dialogue with his own history of “omissions of language,” shaped by the experience of stuttering and unsaid words. This game of tag, chasing through the city these hidden displays and crossings—disfluent words caught in the throat—proposes an exercise that invites us to move from effect to affect. As we delve deeper into Nomeolvides, we lean more and more towards the memory inscribed in matter. There is a desire for contact, hence the muscular sense of Carlos’s artistic practice, which begins at the feet and extends to the hands, hence walking as an intrinsic process, hence the tactile nature of the materials used, that move up and down the body, always handled, always searched.

His body of work, and his work with the body, take on various forms in this exhibition that highlight the memorable essence of letters, albums, inventories, or re-found photographs. These works emerge before us in an initial approach perhaps as indecipherable, overlaid with others, shaken, fragmented... Deliberately, the artist veils and silences them, returning them to us only in the form of unspeakable traces, of what will remain of the objects exposed to the elements of amnesia. Nomeolvides thus presents an alternative to the hegemony of a type of vision distant from the sensitive, precisely to give another space to what was going to be forgotten. And how to look at the forgotten. Will we be able to do so?

After years of investigating the enigma of human bonds through the use of painting, Carlos Herraiz continues this “thought of painting” in mediation with other practices and materials to now wander towards the embodiment of memory, also within his own body, in Nomeolvides. It is thus essential, when visiting this exhibition, to wander through it, to look at it with the hands, not to maintain a prudent distance from the work, to “thin the skin” to allow access to the truth.

Text by Vanesa Peña Alarcón