“The world, as we understand it, is made up as much of what exists as of what eludes us. And what eludes us is far more vast than what exists, yet no less real.”
The becoming of images holds something inevitably mysterious. Where does a composition that moves us arise from, or the initial intuition of a painting that insists on returning again and again? This enigma runs through all artistic creation. Between labor, memory, and inspiration, images seem to emerge from a territory difficult to define-a space where imagination and experience intertwine.
Within this uncertain realm, where, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, an idea of creation gathers countless nights of forgotten love, the works in this exhibition are also situated. Both the paintings of José Cori and those of Rolankay approach that threshold where the visible and the imagined blur, opening onto possible worlds that exist within our own.
In Rolankay's paintings, shadows and dim light prevail. Enclosed spaces, crossed by beams of light and an intense chromatic palette, suggest scenes charged with tension, eroticism, and mystery. Indistinct silhouettes, reflections, and unstable contours construct atmospheres where the unsettling coexists with a latent seduction.
By contrast, José Cori's works unfold an imaginary populated by figures that evoke the mythical and the religious: angels, wanderers, or characters that seem to emerge from ancient narratives. Multiple visual traditions converge in them, from references to Renaissance art to echoes of modern painting, in compositions that combine ornament, color, and historical citations.
In both cases, these images do not seek to explain the world, but to expand it. They are fictions that emerge from the imagination and that, like persistent ghosts, mediate our relationship with reality and open new possibilities for thinking it.
José Tomás Fontecilla, curator
April 2026
