One of the qualities of nature is its ability to create sublime situations for the human being who contemplates them. A volcano, a hurricane, a storm, an earthquake…, those phenomena that exceed all convention and assimilation in our scale of values, are those that art, in one way or another, has tried to imitate and learn from. Today, thanks to the fact that in many fields art has been able to be compared to the all-powerful mass-media (in terms of its production, method and effect), we can enjoy an interesting phenomenon of sociological and artistic study, where morbidity works as an emotional device capable of bringing us closer to such a term and romantic feeling.

But what I am concerned with here is directed at other types of works that do not need a mega-production or cheap method elements or resources to cause this morbid and pseudo-sublime effect typical of the society of the spectacle. Paco Mesa’s work may not be so accessible and impactful to be inserted in this socio-cultural phenomenon, but it is capable of generating an intimate, personal and powerful discourse to bring us closer to a true and exquisite sublime emotion, the result of an intelligent, sensitive and very skilful process.

The space of the Blanca Soto Gallery becomes an energy container with the intervention of Paco Mesa. Energy generated by works that fuse values of duality, polarity and contrast. Mesa resolves with feet of lead and head on a post-minimalist work and what could be called neo-povera that transfers a very conscious aggressive poetics where attraction and rejection follow each other rhythmically through the four pieces that make up the exhibition LIGHT LOVE.

Firstly, we find the invitation card for the exhibition, which works as a work of art, called “domestic heat”, showing an intervention that Paco Mesa designed for a gallery in Milan and now uses as an introduction for the other three works of the exhibition in Madrid. It shows a concrete wall (“against which to crash your head” in Mesa’s words), transforming the gallery (in Milan) into an impenetrable place, an oven, a bunker. Through a small window, a strong, blinding white light shines.

First round, first tug of war, first poisoned candy offered by the artist. A walled-up door, a closed entrance, a light of hope that can leave us blind, a work as an invitation, an invitation (to nowhere?) as a work, a mistake, a lag, an error.

The next round we found him in a big picture. It holds and contains the sweet and sour ingredients necessary to continue the attraction-rejection rhythm. A vaporous, aquatic, soft and deep landscape, corrupted by two buoys of yellow and black color (conjunction of colors that causes greater contrast, in the nature we can enjoy it in dangerous animals), like two wasps that warn us of the electrical field that is between both. The buoys produce a subtle imbalance produced by an imperfect parallelism, an off-centre symmetry and a slight inclination.

Let’s get on with it.

The third round is a double projection of the same video with a delay of only one second. The video(s) show(s) the interior of a building site-ruin that is harassed by spherical projectiles launched from the outside, progressively opening a hole-lucernarium on the roof. Each projectile breaks the roof and brings with it light, while accumulating debris, ruins, heavy residue on the ground. The thunderous noise that these projectiles cause when they break the roof is similar to that of a storm, but unlike the storm, the threatening sound becomes violence realized. The mind frees itself from the material to be autonomous, the soul rises without the need of the physical body. We witness a collapse at the same time as a creation, an opening, a translation, a crisis, a catharsis, a death that gives way to a new life.

And finally the fourth and last round of this exhibition is found in the most emphatic, poetic and suggestive work that masterfully resolves the title of the exhibition LIGHT LOVE. Two electrified slides joined by a garland of red lights. Two elements-lovers that invite us to slide down those childhood memories, where we enjoyed a vertiginous fall in control. Two toy-lovers turned into lethal high-voltage weapons. Two love-elements united by an intensely warm light that places them in a perpetual parallelism. A true love? or perhaps according to the saying, yes, ideal, because as it says: true love is that in which the lovers do not look at each other, but in the same direction.