Public Bench: Eugenio Merino

The initial evocation of the past that articulates the meaning of public monuments has today given way to a reactionary nostalgia. Hence, concealment functions here, at ADN Galeria, as a political form based on the poetics of the visual, and especially on a material as coarse as cement. In the face of evocation (and the feelings that it carries in these representations in the public space), here hiding, counter-representing, functions as a mobilizing force. 

The apparent emptiness at ADN Galeria is presented as a metaphor for how absence is also presence. In the large space we find a cement bench, in the middle of the room, which invites us to sit and listen. 

Merino is inscribed, with this work, in a genealogy of artists who have used this material as a disruptive element, playing with its roughness and with what it hides inside. As we can see here, as we sit on this bench, the material is also ideology. Cement here is more than just a volume. It is the metaphor of that asphalt that we walk on daily, on which we step, and under which more than 100,000 people remain repressed. 

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