Angelus Novus is the title of a small but well-known monotype created in 1920 by the German-Swiss artist Paul Klee depicting an ethereal entity with raised wings, downcast eyes and mouth wide open in an expression of alarm. It was purchased by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who would famously describe its subject as “the angel of history.” In Benjamin’s telling, the angel has turned its back on wreckage of the past but cannot sound the alarm about the present because it is caught in a storm that has disabled its wings, and the philosopher’s conclusion is chilling: “The storm is what we call progress.”

 

The artists Andrés Ávila (Quellón) and Rogelio Lopez Cuenca (Nerja, Málaga) have chosen the theme of Angelus Novus for their collaborative exhibition at Capilla Azul. At the center of the installation, Ávila’s ongoing investigation into robotics and aquatic acoustics have enabled him to transform the two-dimensional protagonists of his graphic novel El Canto del Salmón into three-dimensional figures who emerge from their aquatic domiciles in order to communicate with us, species to species. 

 

Rogelio Lopez-Cuenca’s primary objective within the exhibition is to provide a historical frame for the present moment, which he achieves by folding a different art historical reference into his video: the sacred cadaver surrounded or ministered to by a retinue of the living who are there to call witness. Within Lopez-Cuenca’s montage, the deposition of Christ from the cross and the iconic photograph of Che Guevara after his death are simply different variations on the same narrative.