LO OSCURO QUEMA
Barcelona, Spain 2026
Solo Exhibition at Beta Contemporary
Darkness burns beneath the summer sun. It absorbs light until nothing is reflected back. And then, you can no longer
see. To search for it becomes a kind of game.
In this exhibition, we enter a garden where the black lily takes centre stage. A garden encircling a river, barely held
together by a fragile structure on the verge of collapse. The water moves slowly but with persistence, and in its
course it exposes the vulnerability of its supports, the wear, the threshold of what still manages to remain standing.
Today, in this contaminated terrain, where fire slips through the furrows at first light, the black lily has become a
solitary and ambiguous emblem of both resistance and fear.
Under the gardener’s care, each lily is enclosed within a canvas, conceived as a hortus conclusus in itself. “A garden
for each flower” was the promise once read in a Sacred text, for only through the lily’s isolation can its allure be
contained.
Held in this way, the flowers become apertures through which one may glimpse the abandoned garden without fully
surrendering to its delirium. Like images that seal the dystopian dread of the world, these paintings also reflect the
deeply human gesture of the florist. There is something tender, almost naïve, in the act of tending to a flower: the
brevity of its life softens us; yet for that same reason, the excess of care becomes almost unbearable.
And it is precisely this unbearable excess that ultimately pushes the flower, nearly defenceless, toward surrender. A
quiet delirium, fragile as the faintest tremor, begins to undo it from within, as though its own intensity were consuming
it. The black of its petals unfolds into a silent landscape where only a distant, almost imagined glimmer remains. Its
scent lingers, but its form becomes unrecognisable, as if it had relinquished all memory of itself.
Emmanuel Alvarez and Elena Rocabert
