ANTONI SOCÍAS

Como caído del cielo / Construir el pasado

The relationship between Antoni Socías and Galería Rafael Ortiz dates back to 1988. For 35 years, the artist has regularly shown his work in this space, although in the last 12 years he has ideologically imposed on himself to space out his public appearances.

Socías is an artist committed like few others to the remote meanings of art. In this sense, let’s remember the following paragraph from his catalog Desierto, published by this house on the occasion of his 2007 exhibition: “To understand in depth what the concept Desierto entails, we must first have the firm will to draw a strong dividing line between what some enthusiasts still name and value as art and its current antagonistic projection, the art world, exhaustive and incomprehensible by-product of speculative management, distorted creation and rhetorical communication, which has ended up taking over the noble craft of sublime elaboration”.

Antoni Socías (Inca, Mallorca, 1955) represented Spain at the XXIV Sao Paulo Biennial. He has had solo exhibitions at spaces like La Lonja_Palma de Mallorca/1989, Kunstmuseum_Bonn/2004, CAAM_Las Palmas de Gran Canaria/2012 (Hospital de San Martín), CGAC_Santiago de Compostela or the Es Baluard Museum_Palma de Mallorca. He has also exhibited, both individually and collectively, at the Hispano-American Biennial of Mexico/1982, Memorial Modibo Keita_Bamako/2005,
Musée des Beaux Arts_Kinshasa/2006, CAC_Málaga/2015, Fundación Suñol_Barcelona/2012-2023, and in multiple galleries and fairs in Spain and abroad.

We now present in Seville two of his latest projects: Como caído del Cielo (paintings) and Construir el pasado (photographs).

Como caído del Cielo (1970 – ¿2026?) As if fallen from the sky (1970 – 2026?)

 We are faced with a process that takes place between different dimensions. From reality we pass to a virtual dimension through the world of dreams, and we return to the real world once the dreamed matter has been deciphered, reinterpreted and staged. In this project, Antoni Socías (the sleeping intervener) does not work on his own pictorial work, but re-interprets the pictorial ensemble of an anonymous author located in the interweaving of these periodic dreams, the Master of the Fragility of the World. 

At the beginning of 2019, Socías takes on the responsibility of recovering this legacy from obscurity. His disposition of mind, however, does not correspond to any late-night beatific vision but to the ascetic passion of moving in no man’s land and in empty and complex spaces. Does it mean that the Master of the Fragility of the World and the sleeper have common roots or foundations, perhaps that the former could be an alter ego of the latter, a masked heteronym, a co-eternal avatar of work… or quite the opposite? Let’s not rule anything out, for the moment, and let’s see the first results of this project in the exhibition we present today.

Construir el pasado (1970 – ¿2025?)     Constructing the past (1970 – 2025?)       

Antoni Socías conceives photography as a drawing and uses the camera as a graphite or a burin, precisely to cause deep emotions and imprint them in the espectator’s mind. 

Antoni Socías had for 19 years a primordial work pending, which stirred his conscience. With the advent of digital photography, his archive of negatives was parked in closed boxes… until a year ago. Momentarily, he put painting aside and now devotes his time to recovering all those analogical images (1970-2004), as well as creating new photographic productions from the conjunction, superposition, parallelism or correlation of old photographs. His philosophy is to build from the past to lay the foundations of his creative future. 

Working on his contact sheets, he discovered secret messages that he himself had left in some sets of images so that in the future he could approach the work with new perspectives. These images had been taken long before the current editing and retouching tools existed. Thanks to technology, his past intuition is now becoming a visible reality.