PLACEBO MEADOW

Since its progressive appearance, in Alba Matilla’s work, the digital dimension has on numerous occasions fulfilled the function of refuge or a place to go. The virtual image, in a world that the artist considers wounded and hurtful in equal parts, has always been presented to us as a friendly spectrum of enveloping, highly saturated, bright, practically fluorescent colours.

The author Víctor del Río defines the aesthetic influence of these images, which usually encompass from desk backgrounds, fleeting views of social networks, to icons that have become universal symbols, as an experience that oscillates “between the spectacular and the hallucinatory”, and names those virtual landscapes created from the function of pleasing the user and invite digital immersion as “placebo landscapes.”

Using painting as a common thread, this exhibition aims to collect this virtual imaginary within a posthumous condition of nature and humanity, both being part of the same ecosystem of ruptures, immersed in a turning point in environmental, social and political terms that demand as necessary to rethink the aesthetic image of the world we inhabit. Embracing this virtual effigy, between the beautiful and the delirious, different post-industrial and post-naturalistic scenarios are revisited (a factory that emits toxic gases, a radioactive puddle-carpet, a heart-shaped bramble…) exploring fusion of the virtual and the physical as a legitimate and consistent way of facing this duality of realities, increasingly liquid and where the borders are not always marked.