Assaf Iglesias
(Oviedo, Spain, 1972)
—Installation Plaça Nova Estació (Map)
“It was easy to make plans in Airplane City”. Assaf Iglesias is an artist who engages in written narrative, photography, drawing and painting. El sol de la bandera, aparato maravilloso (The Sun of the Flag, Wonderful Machine) is a mysterious poetic work, a treasure map, an enigma to be deciphered by the reader/viewer. A narrative formed by paintings, polaroid photos and texts. It is a book that we can read between the lines but never finish reading. A short story full of ellipses in which the first-person narrator speaks to us in the past tense: “Balboa Park. That's where I saw the first machine. It was hot and I was alone in San Diego”. The narrator visits the Air and Space Museum and discovers the wonderful machine: an all-metal, single-engine, single-seater American World War Two fighter plane: “In the distance, I saw a mouth full of teeth, and I approached it calmly but thrilled. There it was, a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life, and I sat down beside it to look it over. Every rivet, every part, every detail was a fucking work of art. More beautiful than any work by any artist I admired. This was art” (...) “I didn't know when I would ever see something that beautiful again”.
A cryptic whole in which evanescent polaroids vanishing like water vapour show fragments of these marvellous machines and close-ups of delicate flowers: “Men requested the runway, and the flowers flew”.
The images, the texts, provide faint tracks that enable us to follow the intimate narrative of both a real journey and a dreamlike journey which become confused in memory. “Regret for what is done or not done always comes too late”. A melancholic, sad work full of beauty.