Abelardo Gil-Fournier_The Sing and the Haze_05/06_31/07/26

In this exhibition, Abelardo Gil-Fournier’s first solo show at  Ángeles Baños Gallery, the artist presents two of his most recent works, which approach the image not only as a visible surface but also as an operation that interrogates and interprets the world through its own technical and atmospheric materiality. His works explore a tension that oscillates between turbulence and legibility: between sand carried by the wind and the flight of birds, between the formation of dunes and the utterance of omens. They focus attention on that which disperses, erodes, or shifts, and which, despite this, can still be recorded, translated, or interpreted. From there, the exhibition proposes thinking of the contemporary technical image as part of a long history of mediations between bodies, environments, and signs.

In the series Dunes / Micrographs, the great migrating dune of Råbjerg Mile, in northern Denmark, functions as a material and temporal figure of this space of instability, record, and movement. The Skagen dune, formed through accumulation, displacement, and slow catastrophe, connects the current conditions of the digital image with a landscape observed and captured in the 19th century by a colony of painters attentive to light and atmosphere. Fragments of those paintings are redistributed in layers, particles, and transparencies, as if the image itself had been eroded by an atmospheric current. What appears, the result of a generative system, is not a representation of the landscape, but a visuality in suspension: images crossed by noise, dust, algorithmic circulation, and climatic anticipation.

Artificial Divination carries the question of these circulations to a genealogy of computation prior to the mechanical machine, one linked to the observation of animal behavior. Its three suspended panels transcribe historical treatises on ornithomancy through a typographic system created from the diameters of the rings used in bird banding. The reading of flight, movements, and signs in the sky thus becomes a form of material writing. The piece invites us to think of calculation as a practice not separate from the living world, one that involves attention to its rhythms, signals, and deviations, as occurred in ornithomancy.

The works brought together in The Sign and the Haze suggest a field of resonances between atmosphere and information, between matter and interpretation, between image and environment. A space where legibility does not cancel out turbulence, but rather emerges precisely from it.

The series Dunas / Micrografías is a project carried out with the 2024 Leonardo Grant for Scientific Research and Cultural Creation from the BBVA Foundation.

With the support of