NOMEOLVIDES -

BETA CONTEMPORARY
CURATED BY VANESA PEÑA ALARCÓN

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.