Where did the future go?

We seem to be losing the capacity to understand our position in history and in the world at

large. There is a sinking feeling that things have moved on, becoming more complex, abstract, nonlinear than they were before. The glimmers of a better future are trampled and forgotten under the pressures of an increasingly precarious and demanding present.

Our current infrastructure tends to shape our societies into individualistic, carbon-based, competitive forms, regardless of what individuals or collectives may want. Separation between everyday experience and the larger systems we live within results in increased alienation. We feel adrift in a world we do not understand.

For his latest work, artist Adrian S. Bará continues his use of commonplace, mass-produced construction materials, such as drywall panels, construction studs and cardboard. He eloquently depicts the tension generated between industrial materials and the body.

The ideas explored in this exhibition and the language used here to discuss them were developed during a close engagement with the text Inventing the Future:Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.

In this new series of paintings Bará has layered gently traced silhouettes of figures found in accumulated newspaper images, an attempt to digest the onslaught of stories and lives in our current society. The joys and sorrows, the existences briefly glimpsed through the articles are rendered in soft watercolor application. They feel like slight breaths captured in color. The figures are recorded, but the stories become blurred. When it can feel so easy to become hardened to these bigger events, or feel helpless against larger tides, these paintings are quiet reminders of beauty and hope.