Literature

How does a body leave an inscription in the world?

Every form of writing is an answer to that question.

Long before alphabetic writing, the body had already found ways of inscribing itself into the world. Dance, song, myth, and cave painting were not precursors to writing, but distinct forms of inscription capable of traversing time, leaving within matter something that, like an echo, continues to unfold through new readings.

Joaquín Reyes's painting responds, from another time, to that same question.

He does not paint to reveal an image, but to make visible—though never entirely legible—the conditions of its emergence.

His practice is organized around a tension between two modes of inscription. Each work begins with an initial abstract layer, born from improvisation and gesture. Upon it, a second figurative layer is inscribed, constructed from photographs drawn from his personal archive. Joaquín calls this tension Dialectical Painting: the moment when these two forms of inscription produce a third image that no longer fully belongs to either of the previous two. Rather than being resolved, this tension is reactivated with every new layer.

What matters, however, is not the superimposition of images.

It is that no image is ever truly lost.

They continue to operate beyond the final scene.

Their colors organize the palette, their forms survive in displacement, and their gestures continue to orient the composition. Painting does not erase the path that made it possible; it absorbs it into its own structure. What is left behind is never lost: it transforms the conditions from which each new image reveals itself anew.

Joaquín's dogmas follow the same logic. The restriction of the chromatic palette, the use of stencils, the repetition of patterns, and the frontal position of the body before the canvas do not seek to control painting, but to turn the labyrinth into a map. Only then does it become possible to return to matter again and again without closing off its enigma or becoming lost in the fascination offered by its very resistance.

Looking at these paintings also demands a particular mode of reading. Like a manuscript, painting does not disclose all of its information at once. It is between figures, textures, and colors that the performativity of its language remains encrypted—not as the record of a completed process, but as a form of writing that persists, rewrites itself, and continually reorganizes, overflowing the edges of the canvas in order to exist within another's gaze.

For this reason, Dejar atrás is not about what disappears.

It is about what continues to unfold.

One can only leave behind what one is capable of returning to.

Isabel Croxatto
Choreographer and Curator