Between heaven
and earth

By Chris Luza and Ana Masías

Every painting is a negotiation with time. Before materializing, it is an accumulation of decisions, rectifications, doubts, and permanences that overlap on a support until they constitute a visible form. A painting records an unrepeatable instant of the artist's thought and body. To paint is, therefore, to face a complex temporality: one in which the present gesture coexists with the past of the images that nourish it and with the possibility of future interpretations. In this sense, painting would not be a mere event; it constitutes a space where time acquires materiality. The exhibition Between heaven and earth starts from that condition. Far from proposing a documentary account or a historical reconstruction of specific conflicts, the assembled works construct a visual universe where different memories seem to overlap without ever being resolved. Their characters, architectures, and landscapes refer to recognizable events, but they remain deliberately open, suspended between evocation and uncertainty. What emerges is not a closed narrative, but an open one, in images that invite the viewer to create relationships from their own experience, memory, history, and imagination.

This open condition of painting finds a philosophical antecedent in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's reflection, in his essay Cézanne's Doubt (1945). For him, painting does not consist in illustrating an idea, but in discovering by painting a way of making visible that which does not yet possess a definitive formulation. Painting appears as a process of knowledge and not as the mere representation of external reality. On the other hand, David Joselit thinks of painting from the contemporary conditions of image circulation. In Marking, annotating, storing and speculating (on time) (2016), the author argues that contemporary painting can no longer be understood solely as an autonomous object, but as a node within much broader networks of visual production, archiving, and circulation. These cease to exist solely on a canvas, to continuously move between museums, digital platforms, photographic archives, mobile devices, and individual memories. Today we know that, probably, a work will be photographed, shared, stored, and reproduced countless times. Consequently, contemporary painting simultaneously participates in two temporalities: the material duration inscribed in the painter's work and the speed with which images circulate in digital culture. Joselit points out that we live immersed in a visual economy where images no longer exist as isolated objects, but as elements that circulate and acquire new meanings as they traverse different distribution networks. However, faced with the speed with which these images appear and disappear on digital devices, painting proposes another temporality: a slower experience, where looking implies remaining.

Masías' production could dialogue with the conditions raised by these authors. Some of her compositions seem to be built precisely from a heterogeneous accumulation of visual memories. They are reorganized references to produce new affective relationships. Although many of the images evoke scenarios associated with war, displacement, or ruins, they do not intend to describe specific events. Georges Didi-Huberman pointed out that images possess the capacity to survive the contexts that originated them and establish unexpected relationships with other images from different times. Visual history does not advance linearly; it is built through survivals, displacements, and constant reconfigurations.

Painting appears as a form of knowledge capable of gathering what the speed of contemporary visual culture usually disperses: the time of contemplation, the persistence of memory, and the possibility of establishing affective bonds with images that, even coming from distant contexts, continue to interrogate our own experience. In a historical moment marked by the massive circulation of information and the rapid obsolescence of images, Between heaven and earth claims the capacity of painting to produce a different experience of time. The exhibition provides scenes that do not entirely belong to the past or the present; they exist in an intermediate space where memory, imagination, and contemporary experience intertwine. It is an intermediate space, which is not only a spatial or metaphorical reference, but an ontological condition. The «between» designates a territory where no identity remains completely stable: between life and death, presence and absence, memory and forgetting, document and fiction, past and future, hope and loss, construction and destruction, permanence and change, violence and love, the space we inhabit and the one we do not. It is in that interval where painting acquires the capacity to ask questions.