"When we look at the sky we imagine gods. When we look at the ocean we imagine islands."
Malachy Tallack
For as long as I can remember, atlases and maps have interested me, perhaps because they are, at the same time, abstract and concrete, synthetic and detailed. The lines determine meridians and parallels that cross seas and mountains without stopping at anything, without making distinctions.
For this exhibition Susana Murias has made some pieces mixing the outer shape of the islands, as they appear on a map, with subjective, allegorical or purely formal elements. The islands are perfect metaphors for other worlds, for other lives. And they are an expression of opposite principles; the inaccessible but the conquered. They express, in some cases, the difficulty of accessing its coasts, and, in others the disappointment at what was found at the end of the trip. In the imagination, they all represent something paradisiacal, remote and lonely. That contradiction, which characterizes the symbolic nature of the islands, has perhaps been what has inspired this particular vision.