ON THE WIND BREEZE

 Susana Ventura, January 2025

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“A sound that arrives late to an image” takes as a motto a road trip started by the artist Tiago Madaleno and his girlfriend while attempting to create a small movie. There is no image of this movie, or rather, the image to which the title of this exhibition alludes, results from the transduction of the primary materials of cinema — sound, image, movement, time — into a set of posters. This is how the artist defines the origin of this installation at Galeria Dínamo, resulting, after all, from a succession of events, which can only be explained by the paradoxes inherent in this first desire.

Road movies, popular in America (and beyond), almost always depict an escape into an uncertain destination and unclear future, being the journey itself — in the literal sense of physical movement and spatial and temporal passage through places and intense experiences — simultaneously character and narrative, the main reason of the movie. This movie genre has become the symbol of an initiatory and, at times, desperate search for any spiritual or cultural identity. The travelogue format, being the maximum expression of a freedom achieved by “being in constant movement”, implies a social critique and explores the consecutive ideological tensions between rebellion and tradition, when many of the (almost always) fateful outcomes end up revealing that, after all, a total escape from established structures of power and conservatism is not possible.

These intentions and ideas are not predefined in the artist's installation, however, there is a cyclical movement inherent to this journey that ends up defining the works that make up the installation. Likewise, as we move through the space, which ends up mimicking the travelogue genre, we are constantly being referred to the road movie and, inevitably, to everything it represents. Galeria Dínamo is an exhibition space that goes against the logic of the white cube, with visual axes that allow simultaneity of planes and large windows that enable an intercommunication in between spaces, overlapping and reflecting the everyday interior rhythms and images and city noises from outside. Inevitably, TheSpaceInYourHead (the exhibition that brings together three interventions by different artists in the gallery, including “A sound that arrives late to an image”, by Tiago Madaleno) occupies doubly a space between two: between this interior-exterior-interior of the gallery's game of reflections and the externalization that any creative and aesthetic impetus outlines — an escape from that other space that consumes us internally.

In Tiago Madaleno's installation, the first implicit movement is the escape from excess information towards a vast and silent landscape, which, paradoxically, returns to the gallery space as the reverberation of a sound, arriving late to an image. This sound takes the form of small sounds, converted into visual onomatopoeia and small gestures like the familiar one of the hand that dances in the wind outside the car window... The wind also seems to bring with it the image-synthesis from the road movie’s image-movement — its poster — sweeping the space and sticking it to the large windows and the mirror wall, repeating the sound that we will never hear, although the poster seeks, in every situation, to find ourselves (in a second paradox, as the search for an identity can, after all, find its completion in the Other). The image as the other of sound continues to refer to the primary domain of the film, as does the magnetic paint, which allows the “decal” of the poster on the glass and mirror and brings to itself a reminiscence of the materiality of the cinematographic film, occupying these other in-between spaces, in a game that the artist explores according to the surface (glass or mirror). Sometimes, the poster merges with the background and seems to disappear; other times, it expands out the window or transforms into multiples, consuming the infinite surface of a thousand reflections; another times, it transforms into a light box or, exhausted, it rests in a red tube, a fiery note of color (maybe relating to the drive of the travel that hovers over us or foreshadowing some tragic end that haunts it — also about what it represents). Except in this singular situation, the artist limits himself to the color black as a counterpoint to the transparent or mirrored surface, reminding us, through the use of words and symbols (both the word and the drawings become symbols in the poster format) of the intertitles of silent cinema, in that moment of suspension of the cinematic narrative in which the sound perpetuates through the image what cannot be seen. Also in the artist's installation, the black of the magnetic paint absorbs the noise and surrounding information so that we can only focus on the sounds that reach us from the image. And then, I can hear the breeze of the wind in my hand.  //