Por amor al comercio takes its title from Esclarecidos’ homonymous third album released in 1987. This song, which Pedro sang with delight and fervor introduces a sense of joy, frivolity and revelry which in his work does not translate as levity, but as a profound commitment to the surfaces of the world.
Many of the works in this exhibition overlap techniques and materials, some of them standard and some others invented by Pedro himself. The warmth of light, the viscosity of wax and the brightness of paillettes do not hold still. They catch light and attention, and we dazzle with them.
Maybe that’s one of the reason why most of these works remain untitled: in them, the passing of time is not a transient condition, but a continuous ripple to our unfinished affairs.
Spanning the making of shoes, sewing patterns, or the assemblage of engineering planes, Pedro developed an aesthetic grammar in which patronaje is not a method of projection and anticipation but a structure of fantasy. His drawings do not set the contours of a figure to come, but the various structural and intimate scales where impasses lie, that suspended system in which erosion, authority and degradation, coexist with desire, devotion and love. And that’s what his understanding of surface registers: the cruelty and the tenderness.
A paillette trembles in a breath, a step, a draught from a door. It makes visible what ordinary life tries to hide: the party is never only a party. It is also the minute before it ends, and the knowledge of that minute lends every sparkle its weight.
So the dazzling is not levity. It is a depth that arrives sideways, through the glimmer and not despite it. Like the song that gives Por amor al comercio its title, it carries a more transcendental meaning: the commerce of attachments, the way we trade our love, the weight of what we touch.
