It is fascinating how graphite on paper and black and white photography, despite their apparent opposition, converge on an essential point. Two extremes that, instead of repelling each other, meet at a secret point, a kind of aesthetic conspiracy. The intriguing thing is that both operate in the realm of absence, of the unsaid, of what is barely hinted at, as if they were writing in a secret language, a writing made of silence.

There is a curious symmetry in the confrontation between graphite and black and white photography, as if both forms of art were reflected in an infinite mirror, where opposites do not cancel each other, but rather complement each other in an essential enigma: the writing of the silence, the translation of emptiness.

Joan Cardells' graphite, that black and elemental line, is not just a line on paper; It is a shadow that has decided to stop. It is a line that, by a whim of fate, refuses to move forward, containing within itself a scream that does not dare to come out. There is something fascinating in that silence, in that dark trace that, in reality, is light in its purest and most essential form. It is the shadow frozen in time, a petrified scream on the surface of the paper, an echo that persists in its muteness. As in Borges' mirrors, it is a trail of darkness that, in its contradiction, is also the purest form of light.

On the other hand, Manuel Vilariño's photography, writing of light in its most literal meaning, captures the moment in which the shadow seems to surrender. The light is deposited on the sensitive surface, but what is truly revealed is what is not there, what the light cannot touch. It is the paradox of the frozen moment: the more intense the illuminated areas, the more unfathomable the silence of the shadows becomes. These act as a mirror that reflects the moment when blackness seems to give way to light. But what really captures is not the light, but the shadow, what is outside the reach of the light. And it is there, in that paradox of the stopped moment, where photography becomes a light trap that traps the invisible, what remains out of focus.

There is something almost magical in these works, in those figures that are barely outlined in a stroke or in that light that, when overflowing, leaves behind an unbreakable shadow. It is in that intermediate space, in that no man's land where shadow and light intersect, where the work of Cardells and Vilariño meets and dialogues without words, in a language made of absences, of voids that, suddenly, transform in presences.

Drawing with graphite and photography are, basically, two ways of writing about nothing. Cardells casts a shadow; Vilariño catches a light. But both sculpt and model that emptiness that, in its own denial, becomes something tangible, almost palpable. It is a game, an artifice that, in its simplicity, hides infinite complexity.

Cardells' shadow drawing delves into the darkness to search for a truth that cannot be seen in broad daylight. The absence of color is a strategy, a trick to direct attention to what really matters: the structure, the form, that skeleton of shadows that gives body to reality. In that darkness, in that gray area, Cardells finds his own language, a language that speaks with silences, with suggestions that have more weight than any outright statement.

Vilariño, with his photography, does something similar, but in the opposite direction. It takes light, that light that reveals everything, and uses it to hide, to wrap the visible in a layer of mystery. His images, full of a serenity that seems to come from another world, emerge like ghosts from the darkness, not to scare, but to invite a state of contemplation, of reflection.

Cardells and Vilariño, in this game of shadows and lights, take us to a terrain where reality becomes ambiguous, where what matters is not what is shown, but what is hinted at, what is left out of the frame. "The Silence of the Shadows" is, then, more than a title, a kind of declaration of principles. A tribute to fragility, to subtlety, to that beauty that can only exist in the shadows, in the unsaid, in what remains to be discovered or, perhaps, will never be revealed.

Organized by 𝟭𝟴|𝟱𝟮 𝗕𝗶𝗼𝗵𝘂𝗯 𝗟𝗶𝗳𝗲 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗔𝗿𝘁 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 and Jorge López Galería