Matter as Metaphor
Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta, 2023
Statement for the solo exhibition Floating Matter, Can Gelabert, 2023
Tarkovsky once said that he preferred to express himself metaphorically, rather than symbolically or descriptively; he believed that symbols carry a meaning that is too fixed and intellectual, whereas metaphor is a more open and sensitive image, possessing the same indeterminacy as the worlds it attempts to convey. The infinite cannot be explained from the finite. It is in that imprecise and stimulating zone where Alejandro Javaloyas (Palma, 1987) develops his research—a body of work born from accumulated knowledge, lived experience, and shared emotion, gradually introducing the coordinates of chance, the unpredictable predictability of the algorithm, and the uncontrollable drift of artificial intelligence that is growing faster than we can absorb.
Floating Matter is a visual exploration that originates from a mass that is both weightless and heavy—a strange body the artist inserts into liminal zones, into those spaces of uncertainty where perception loses its grip, where ideas have no single definition, and where beauty comes into contact with unease. It is a project that revolves around the mysterious unrest provoked by that enigmatic and blurred rock levitating in depopulated landscapes, where human presence is only suggested by the trace it leaves behind. This floating matter is an image—a metaphor—that recurs constantly in Javaloyas’s work: in his expanded drawing, his digital post-painting, his evocative videos, his carefully staged found installations, and, of course, in that ultra-photography that asserts its independence while efficiently proposing new ways of making and creating.
This dark mass at the center of his works—a seemingly inert material with an almost living appearance—seems frozen in definite motion, in a parabola that leaves a trail in its wake and anticipates the foretelling projection of a journey yet to come. It’s something like the fluid line of a half-drawn sketch, like the rhythm of notes on a musical staff in an unfinished composition, like the curves of a heartbeat unaware of its own end. These pieces go beyond introducing the poetry of the uncanny into the aesthetics of the everyday—they also raise timely questions about how images are constructed and by whom, about what they mean and what they are for. These works stem from the unfathomable reservoir of a digital intelligence that continues to accumulate forms, concepts, and methods for the artist to structure, select, and intervene in a conjunction of talent, sensitivity, judgment, causality, and chance.
To generate all the two-dimensional pieces in this project, Alejandro Javaloyas initiates a peculiar conversation with this artificial intelligence, which is reaching immense power and scale. The digital device responds to textual prompts proposed by the artist, producing a sequence of algorithmic images where the creator controls only the words that spark their emergence. Through this process, a wide array of visual representations emerges, seeking to converge with all the ideas Javaloyas has been feeding into it. Many of these images are lost in translation; others deviate in form or concept, while a few—only a few—resonate with the precise research this artist is meticulously developing.
These works—induced, selected, and modified by the artist but generated by artificial intelligence—challenge the very notion of authorship and the traditional definition of photography. The Floating Matter project is deeply immersed in today’s urgent process, in which photographic language seeks full autonomy: casting off its role as notary of a reality reproduced to the point of nausea; rejecting pictorialist detours, documentary narrative, and even the pedantic rhetoric of post-photography. A new kind of photography—without photos, sometimes without a camera—where the author merely provides a thought, a barely verbalized mental image that takes shape through that unfathomable digital archive driven by an algorithm that may, perhaps, know more about us than we know ourselves.
Floating Matter is the expression of an ultra-photography that has gained its freedom. A project where light and its absence matter; where haunting and abstract beauty coexist with material, immaterial, and digital elements; where image reproduction, uniqueness, and aura collide with the infinite, the universe, and the metaverse; with the microscopic and the telescopic, the nuclear and the liminal; with reflection, mirror, and glass; with fragile balance, the subtle and the infrathin; with photographic support, its texture and grain; with blur, distortion, and aberration; with interference and error, fracture and accident, the passage of time and time frozen. But also with play, irony, joy, and the absurd subversion of the everyday. These characteristics—especially the latter—also define the object-based installations with their deliberately spontaneous appearance and the enigmatic, evocative video creations that Alejandro Javaloyas weaves into the exhibition space. All of it comes together to give shape to a unique metaphor of our lives through an unsettling, floating matter. That is, among other things, what images are for.