Like the old rag-pickers, scavenging among the spoils we discard, Raúl Hidalgo has painstakingly collected the fragile matter that comes from the mechanical cleaning of other people’s garments. Of that second skin, diverse and experienced, that constitutes the dirty clothes. Littered with secrets, indecipherable traces and hidden fluids, which we now contemplate, turned into an impossible cartography of sterilized memories. The residue deposited in the filters of the industrial dryers, prefigures a new and unknown matter of homogeneous and dull color, of a neutral gray, which seems to want to equalize the aspirations and all those outfits that were once intended to differentiate themselves. These remains are shown in all their strangeness, stretched and disintegrating, drawing random forms of ephemeral nature that refer to the nineteenth-century fondness for romantic ruin.
Being, at the same time, clear product of a mechanized contemporaneity that phagocytes at a speed of vertigo everything that finds in its path. The artist’s brilliant intervention has transformed the waste into a suggestive hanging installation, which will disintegrate in a whimsical way, in the form of work in progress as the hours pass. Falling off in a vertical journey, the lumpy lint will settle on the ground leaving a volatile and intangible imprint that will eventually disappear, like the forgotten remnants of a recent past. A living and suggestive work, which in short, constitutes a crude metaphor of the transience of time, of human frailty, of the futile and banal of our own existence.
Fuencisla Miguel Muriedas. Art historian