Juan Diego Tobalina at Enhorabuena Espacio, Madrid

I never knew Carlos; I knew Efraín.
He was my father’s brother.

Throughout my childhood, that was the only name that existed. Much later, I discovered there was another: Carlos. A name under which he had built a different life, a filmography, an archive, and a character that seemed to change depending on whom the story was meant for. He invented versions of himself with the same ease with which he directed his films.

Over time, I came to understand that perhaps there had never been a single story. That Carlos was not merely a pseudonym, but a way of constructing and inhabiting a fiction.

This exhibition does not attempt to reconstruct his life, nor to verify its truth. What interests me is what remains when a biography begins to unravel among contradictory accounts, fragmented images, and memories we can no longer tell apart from the films he produced.

Throughout this process, I returned again and again to Infrasexum, the first film he directed. In it, the protagonist abandons a life incapable of producing pleasure and sets out in search of it through carnal and superficial stimuli, ultimately finding in painting the true motivation for his life. I am interested in it because, behind that universe of images of desire, art ultimately emerges as a form of transformation, and ends up overcoming the pleasure of the body itself.

The works in this exhibition do not illustrate his films, but they do work with what remains of them. They are made of gestures, glances, and the proximity between two bodies. They appear as fragments caught between soft materials, rigid surfaces, and partially concealed forms, as if memory itself needed a physical structure to hold it together.

In this process, I found an opportunity to return to the ways of constructing and concealing that have accompanied my own artistic practice: reflections, filters, transparencies, hidden objects, the tension between hard and soft, and experimentation with materials as a way of constructing a narrative. In some way, these devices enter into dialogue with the way “Carlos” constructed his own life. His story was also a material construction, a fiction built from the ground up within an industry in which image, desire, and character could become indistinguishable.

I came to understand that what interested me was not the scenes themselves, but the spaces in which they could take place: the sets, the lighting, the lamps, the curtains, the music, the folding screens. Everything that normally remains at the margins of the narrative and yet sustains its atmosphere. Desire does not inhabit bodies alone, but also the objects that surround them.

Perhaps this is what I truly inherited from him. Not a biography, but the suspicion that every identity needs to construct a stage in order to exist.

—Juan Diego Tobalina