"Afi's Noon," a Journey to the Sun.

Afeli’s Noon points to the question of going beyond planet Earth to conquer new spaces; thus, it speculates with a trip towards the aphelion, far from the Sun, where the light does not arrive. The starting point is more than a dozen years of research. In this solo exhibition by Rubèn Verdú, the great piece of new creation produced at Hangar - an interactive and immersive video installation that plays with the visitor - enters into dialogue with old pieces that the artist recovers and reactivates.

For Verdú, the literary world is also a space where potential works of art can be exhibited. This literary methodology allows him to update the concept of conceptual art, since with this exercise he manages to complete a work of art without giving it material, keeping it in a purely speculative field. First, we find a prologue consisting of seven pieces that introduce us to the great central piece. These are seven phrases, literary descriptions of works of art. For the occasion, the artist has taken part in seven science fiction novels by authors who, through this genre, not only raise fantastic questions but also have a deep philosophical dimension, “more of a thought than a fiction ”: The Man Who Fell to Earth, by Walter Tevis; The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin; Alba, by Octavia E. Butler; Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson; Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer; The Clear and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem.

"I try to explore the validity of art in science fiction." The artist puts himself in the shoes of all these authors to intervene in a fragment of inserting works of art. In Walter Trevis's novel, for example, we discover some porcelain sculptures from the Lladró house. The selected novels, like the title of the show, are a more or less veiled reference to the Sun. It is, in a way, an Icarian proposal that invites us to approach the great star despite the risks. At the same time, he wonders what the future holds for art and artistic practices. Rubén Verdú moves between artistic practice, research and writing about and from art. He is also the founder of PeepingMonster. His works are totally affected by the extreme ubiquity of the visual. As the artist states, we are subject to the “discipline of the eye,” a kind of instinctive determinism that imposes its gaze on us.