A new singer sings an old song

Xavi Ceerre
Herrerro de Tejada 2023

The same passion that Böcklin felt for mythology or Baudelaire for the cartographic reliefs of the wrinkles of old prostitutes is expressed by Xavi Ceerre with elements that refer us to the origin: charcoal, newspaper ink, a pencil... The fundamental nature of this work is revealed in essential and primitivist forms that resonate in our minds, stimulating the most abstract springs of the imagination. The result is a reality that pleases in its euphoric and disciplined agglomeration.

Ceerre's work, in its dialogue with the already been, comes to reveal to us that PAINTING, or rather, THE NEW, is nothing more than a dialectical meeting, a copulation between the past and the future in order to give meaning to the present. His work awakens jazzy appetites. Ceerre paints with his fingernails. He tells us—whether we want to listen or not—that TOMORROW IS YESTERDAY.

The uniqueness of her painting bridges the gap between The History of Art with a capital H and The Street with a capital H, whether it be that of drug-addicted Atlanta or that of Afro-Latina New York. We owe to both (and this is the purpose of this work) the miracle of having hammered the frames of some paintings, desecrating pop art design studios and turning spray paint and sampling into tools of self-defense.

A New Singer Sings an Old Song is a sharp recollection, free from melancholic disturbances. The urban paradise that Banksy trivializes and commercializes is the cult object of a work that seems to have been created the day after tomorrow. This Ottodixian artist tells us that Paris was a party, that Barcelona is a party, and that in the party, as in art, there is something that must die; a coal that burns itself out and culminates in a new meaning.

In its humble and incendiary subtlety, the madness of the night is lucid like black walls, rabid like ink; a vindication of blackness as a color prohibited by the current standards of the pictorial canon, a canon that consumes itself and forgets; it forgets the past, it forgets that the future is composed of drawing; the first element: the black line. Where there is something burning that smells alive, eternity and the ephemeral are lovers. The color black that always was is accompanied by the fluorescent color that never is: dynamite pink, which, like our turbo-accelerated and (post)post-whatever individuality, will die young.

Carla García Domènech