Bookstores out of context and empty churches in Blanca

The temporary exhibition hall of the Pedro Cano Foundation opens today at 12:00 noon the exhibition ‘Libraries’, by Pau Pellín, which can be seen until July 2. As explained by the painter and illustrator from Alicante, this series that is shown in the Blanqueño space was born after reading the story by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Library of Babel’. It describes a space similar to the combs of a beehive, where books are stored in a systematic and orderly manner in which we can find all possible combinations of known alphabets.

“Volumes of absurd content are stacked on shelves along with those that, by chance, have put together the necessary combination to give rise to a coherent story like ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘The Bible'”, says the creator. “We can find books written with a single question mark or even a blank book, but most of them will show nothing more than typographical gibberish that librarians, born in that suffocating universe, try to make sense of,” says the author. of this exhibition, which has received several awards, including the Second Prize in the XVIII Painting Prize of the University of Murcia (2018). In addition, it has been selected in international and biennial competitions such as the Iberdrola-Miguel Hernández University, Ispanica-essenza di storia contemporanea in Naples (Italy), Walls at the Pinacoteca Carlo Contini in Oristiano (Sardinia, Italy) and more recently in the XII and XIII La Rioja Parliament Contest.

«Nobody who inhabits the Library has known its limit, none of its inhabitants has managed to decipher the logic of such a construction», continues the artist, who considers that «knowledge of reality and its possible discernment become the key to the vault of Libraries” and that he wanted to convert his work “into the plastic expression of this intellectual unease”. In ‘Libraries’ she captures bookstores in decontextualized spaces, such as abandoned industrial warehouses or empty churches without a trace of humanity, “as if man had surrendered to the evidence of his own inability to decipher the common link that establishes meaning.”