Manuel Aja Espil

1.
In 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley published Ozymandias, one of the seminal poems of nineteenth-century Romantic literature. Its title refers to the Greek name of Ramses II, the most powerful pharaoh of ancient Egypt, who filled his realm with ambitious works of infrastructure and monumental self-glorifying statues. The young and radical Shelley, an enemy of all forms of despotism, mocks in his poem the arrogance of the emperor who sought to achieve immortality. Time has reduced his works and his name to ruins and oblivion.

Manuel Aja Espil draws from Shelley's poem to title his latest series of paintings: a group of eerie landscapes, of medium and large scale, which depict geographies as spectacular as they are diverse, where the overwhelming force of nature contrasts with the crumbling vestiges of our industrial age. In this work, as in Shelley's Ozymandias, nature, master of all powers, prevails, silences, and returns human ambition to its rightful measure. However, unlike Shelley, Aja Espil looks toward the future: from a time that has dispensed with humankind (and animals as well), he delivers a message of warning about the present.

2.
Every depiction of landscape implies a form of understanding and apprehending nature, and through it, a way of conceiving humanity and art. The Romantic painters, unlike anyone before or after them, elevated the genre of landscape to a sphere of metaphysical and civilizational reflection. Their canvases bear witness to the tragic self-awareness of Modernity, which acknowledges the failure of science and reason to reconcile the Human Being with the Whole.

Aja Espil's works do not belong to the Romantic canon, and yet, as in that tradition, landscape emerges through an exercise of subtraction. The characters that animated his earlier series-scenes of carefully calibrated drama-have vanished from his canvases. Without them, the backdrop has emancipated itself, acquiring greater narrative depth and complexity. Nature becomes the protagonist. This shift, like everything in Aja Espil's work, unfolds as a matter of pure pictoriality. A refined chromatic exploration (pinks and blues for skies, browns and greens for forests, nocturnal blues and grays, alpine light blues and whites) guides the viewer through sublime geographies of the artist's own invention.

Each of Aja Espil's paintings multiplies within itself into many others. The landscapes emerge from a play of superimpositions, presences and absences, of balances and shifting weights among the depicted elements. Scale becomes independent from perspective, expanding or reducing mountains, trees, or machines according to their role within the whole. Beneath the weight of the skies and their hypnotic radiance, it is the painting itself that guides our gaze, creating focal points amid vast passages of transition, where contours and shadows define what is represented.

3.
The Romantics evoked with melancholy, through dismembered temples and palaces covered, with moss, soil, and wild vegetation, an exotic, incomprehensible and yet longed-for Golden Age-one humanity had turned its back on. In contrast, within Aja Espil's paintings we encounter treasures from an industrial era that is past, present, and even yet to come. Enigmatic remnants, corroded by the silent and relentless passage of time, conceal their origins but testify to the outcome of an unequal struggle between humankind and nature. Airplanes, engines, turbines, and satellites constitute the technological traces which confirm that a civilization once existed there, situating these scenes in an unsettling continuity with our own present.

These are ruins devoid of nostalgia. Their effect of estrangement does not recall so much our dream life, but belongs to the lineage of science fiction. It is worth noting that before devoting himself to painting, Aja Espil studied film and developed his artistic sensibility from childhood through comics, literature, and fantasy cinema. It is no coincidence, then, that these exercises in future archaeology echo the dystopian imagery of many contemporary post-apocalyptic films and series.

Two of the landscapes created by the artist deliberately disrupt the order and expected significance of the series, introducing a closer, more intimate scope of the effects of the Anthropocene. Smaller in scale, these paintings exhibit aerial views of miniature agroproductive units composed of microchips. In these works, the artist does not portray nature but instead depicts contemporary human geography, both individual and collective, through the essential component that mediates all our current relationships with machines.

4.
In a recent poem, Ben Clark warns against traditional readings of Ozymandias. Shelley's true purpose, he argues, was not to proclaim that time puts an end to tyrants, but to warn us that, despite defeating them, power will persist through the ages. Through art, Aja Espil embraces another indestructible force: the ability to create images that enrich our experience of the world and give shape to possible futures. That is where the political nature of these works lies. These are paintings that advocate for a more ambitious temporal power, one capable of assuming a greater mission than the circumstantial interests of current leaders. It is a form of politics committed to the very foundations of our existence as a species, that regards the contingent and ephemeral with universal responsibility and acts in favor of nature for strictly human reasons. In this way, these landscapes forge an intertemporal alliance with Romantic thought, which, as occurs in the sonnet that lends the series its title, claims that only art (whether that of the ancient Egyptian sculptors, of Shelley, or even of Aja Espil) can survive the voracity of the present, for it partakes in the eternal truth of the universe.