I'm tired, boss.

The exhibition you will see below is a sample of the work of artists who have been part of the Galería Nueva team this year. It is no coincidence that, when we proposed the exhibition to them, the main themes that emerged were tiredness, overproductivity, lack of identity and anxiety combined with uncertainty.

Byung-Chul Han, in The Tired Society, proposes several of the keys that have led us to be, in the end, a tired society. In the age of ultra-reproducibility, in which images and content are disseminated at TikTok speed, it seems impossible to take in all the information available to us. It is projected as a dystopia of the possibilities that Benjamin saw in The Work of Art in the age of its technical reproducibility. Decisions become faster and faster, there is no space for reflective critique and we resort to increasingly polarised positions, the result of this speed and lack of reflection.

This first contact with the art world has helped these artists to live the experience first-hand: to find themselves with the possibility of working in the field they are passionate about while at the same time realising its precariousness and difficulties. For many, it means the last year of the student period and the step towards the professionalisation of their practice. There is no period of rest, of reflection. The ‘capitalist realism’ that Mark Fisher announced leaves no room for that, and becoming one more tool of the system is no longer an option, but an obligation. How to produce an original and ‘perfect’ work? How to fit into the art world? How to begin to professionalise my practice? That’s when the doubts appear: feeling like an impostor among thousands of examples to compare oneself to, searching for individuality as well as a group belonging characteristic of the human being, struggling with a constant frustration of reaching objectives and goals quickly without time to stop in the processes, because, if not, you will be left behind. As Han concludes, only reflection can save us from the exhaustion generated by self-exploitation, and this exhibition functions as an emergency call through the world of art, one of the few spaces that can still save us.

The works of Andrea Galazo (Getafe, 2003) and Alicia Drolma (Talavera de la Reina, 2002) create a dialogue that reflects on rest. While Galazo’s work proposes the experience of the journey as a space of pause, in which to escape from the ultra-reproductibility of everyday life through the experience of drawing and painting a plein air, Drolma’s work shows the inability to rest. The space of the bed is projected as an uncomfortable space in which the previous childish fantasy is abandoned and only adult preoccupation remains. The very act of painting becomes a tool for reflection, in which one serves to escape from the pressures of everyday life, while the other is fully immersed in representing these concerns.

If there is one thing that characterises contemporary people, it is their lack of definition. We receive so many in-puts that it seems impossible to stay with one thing, and this ends up affecting the construction of our personality. We are forced to make decisions in a vertiginous way, which discards the capacity for critical reflection and ends up leading to a banal polarisation. The inability to define is what the works of Raquel Ocaña (Madrid, 2003), Elena Pérez (Madrid, 2004) and Javier Liedtke (Tenerife, 2002) talk about. Ocaña’s work shows the wide range of influences that are received in the contemporary era to define one’s own personality, in which the need to belong to a group through ‘viral’ references ends up shaping a way of being that is often ephemeral, changing and fragile. For her part, Elena Pérez represents a figure with several heads that symbolises the accumulation of pressures and self-demands that the individual faces within her own being, overwhelmed by an enormous horizon of expectations projected, to a large extent, by social networks. In the same way, Liedtke uses metamorphosis to represent sentimental somatization. The figures we see in his pieces undergo different transformations that refer to inner feelings, which he converts into surreal figurative expressions.

Finally, the works of Sara Rojo (Madrid, 2002) focus on the representation of waiting spaces. In the age of over-productivity, these spaces become hostile, in which the consumption of content on the Internet, alienation and impatience end up invading the whole atmosphere of the place. Here appear the allegories that Rojo portrays: dehumanised beings, hybrids, who represent this loss of horizon. Spaces of rest and waiting become places of transition and the beings who inhabit them become dehumanised to the point of existential crisis.

Curatorship and text by Gerard Zamora Jiménez.