La Posta Foundation presents the exhibition “Still Not Life” with works by Alfonso S. Luna, the first of a series of exhibitions and research projects that are the result of the agreement reached with the Center for Research in Arts of the Miguel Hernández University, which includes different Research Groups: Massiva, IAM-Lab [Artistic and Medial Interference Laboratory] and Bèrnia. It is precisely the latter, the Bèrnia Research Group, directed by Professor Kosme de Barañano, with whom this collaboration began, showing the results of the “Still Not Life” series developed by the artist Alfonso S. Luna, a member of the group.

“Still life” consists of the representation of inanimate objects that, especially after the Baroque, acquired symbolic meanings capable of transmitting emotions, portraying situations or even consolidating dogmas. Yet a few centuries after its heyday, the technical ability to generate and reproduce images forever changed the paradigm of art, as Benjamin painstakingly developed in his day.

At a time when the technological tools of image creation not only occupy the center of concern of artistic researchers, but have also become the dominant and massive communication language among humans, Alfonso S. Luna pays attention to the capacity for emotion that the material image still preserves, created with the artistic gesture that germinates at the precise moment and grows like a living being.

The world has now been plunged for two years in a kind of tense silence, in a state of containment and partial life. That confined, self-conscious life mediated by cameras, screens and technical pixelated images is described by Luna as “Still Not Life”, that life that is not yet life. And in the midst of this avalanche of images he presents us with a collection of pictorial works that resort to abstraction as a way to pause time, to silence noise and look inward. Because when the brain does not recognize any concept or idea linked to the image that is presented to it as a work of art, when it does not find any recognizable or symbolic figure, there is a moment of silence in the mind.

This series of seven pieces made during 2021 seeks to generate that silence that stimulates the sensations in a story that, referring to the titles of the works, goes from the equivocal to the shady, stopping in the brief, in the ephemeral, being aware of the transit to identify our own search for El Dorado.