Cordova,
It has been more than fifteen years since the duo formed by Alegría Castillo Roses and José Antonio Sánchez Piñero, both graduates in Fine Arts from the University of Granada, began their joint career: it was in 2009, when they carried out the monument Tribute to José Val del Omarposing that sculpture as a camera obscura, a looking machine. A good part of their projects, in fact, have had to do with experimentation, through basically sculptural processes, with gadgets that refer to the antecedents of cinema and photography: they have created optical systems and mechanisms that function as means of production and interpretation of the image.
Among his long-term fundamental works are Fire Test (2009-2016), a series made up of eleven works that delve into the germinal nature of the static image, bending it until revealing what is hidden in it, lacking a temporal or narrative dimension; and Encyclolalia (2014-2022), a proposal focused on the phenomenology of speech in which they studied what is hidden behind language, subjecting it to exercises that find the origin of the voice beyond the throat, tongue and lips, to place it between hands, mud and air. In both creations they use mechanics, due to their elemental and precise nature, to plan the creation of their pieces with rigor: they try to combine discipline and play, to deploy their fantasy from a coherent base.
Until next March, Alegría and Piñero present at the C3A in Córdoba, the Center for Contemporary Creation of Andalusia, “De ida y return”, a compendium of past and recent works in which they have continued analyzing the options for the representation of language based on of sculptural materials that seek to free them from symbolic, expressive implications, linked to affects, to grant them new readings, other perspectives. Among his earliest pieces in the exhibition are doner (2016) and Self-sealing heads I and II (2015), who highlight the possibility of perceiving duplicities and hidden meanings in every mechanical device, every material component susceptible to acquiring another interpretation. In his words, We generate a list of raw materials, elemental to sculpture: iron, ceramics, beech… and we detect those that have palindromic potential, that is, they can be read in two senses. We detect an exclamation in the “iron”: ‘oh, king!’, and we are overcome by the need to find those other images that are hidden in the body of language and that the trope seems to reveal. As in a scale, on one side we place the elements, for example, nappa, macramé thread, net, oak; and on the other, the scenes that will be created with these same materials emerge: the edge stands out, grinding bread. In this game of balance, language subjected to the trope seeks counterweights and conjures scenes; each word is for it and for another at the same time; Each material is irreplaceable and occupies its exact place.
His investigations into the double and the reversible have a fundamental playful aspect and seem to refer at times, too, to the complex works with the words of Cortázar, who pointed out that a palindrome It is the hell of freedom, because it is the place where meaning is subjected to the tyranny of symmetry, but at the same time, in that rigor the most unpredictable freedoms are unleashed.. In addition to reflecting meanings, this figure alters or multiplies them.

He has also arrived at this Cordoba space Mobile landscapethe result of the collaborative work of Alegría and Piñero with the users of the La Puebla de Cazalla Occupational Center, focused on people with intellectual disabilities. This work is articulated here in two projects that open and close the exhibition route: the first is Panorama by traina rotating structure that offers a roll of fabric painted on both sides with scenes on which, in synchronized activations, light effects, Chinese shadows and a sound archive made up of musical themes and own narratives are displayed; the last one is Round trip panoramaa kind of show that has been created specifically for this exhibition. By turning in the opposite direction, that roll of fabric gives rise to a different narrative, using the diorama through.
It is one more example of the interest of this duo of Andalusian artists in bringing together beginnings and endings and pointing out the two possible faces to contemplate in almost everything: a palindrome It is an inversion where the meaning returns to its starting point, but in the return, something has changed; It is not just a mirror, but an alteration of symmetry that reveals new possibilities within the repeatednoted Gilles Deleuze.

Alegría and Piñero. “Round”
C3A. CONTEMPORARY CREATION CENTER OF ANDALUSIA
C/ Carmen Olmedo Checa, s/n
Cordova
From September 27, 2024 to March 9, 2025