Prats Nogueras Blanchard is pleased to present Lo que está presente [What is present], an exhibition by Erick Beltran in our Madrid space. In this new project, Beltrán reflects on the representation of power and explores how Baroque iconography shapes our vision of the present, through emblems and impresas that appear on funerary monuments and in epistles of good governance. He connects figures drawn from the collective psyche and ideology, continuing his research on the Pudridero [the Rotting chamber] and other metaphorical methods of political power.

Since the 16th century, there has been a tradition of compiling emblems and impresas in the form of letters addressed to princes, offering suggestions, warnings, and precepts on the exercise of governance. They are also inquiries or criticisms directed at society, on moral, political, and philosophical concerns. They question the definitions of control, authority, power, justice, limits and the borders of the subject or the state, without neglecting the avalanche of mirages, traps, and enigmas that come with them.

The impresa is a visual riddle. It symbolically represents an intention (impresa etimologically derived from emprendere) through a slogan and an image that challenge one another. Yet if the subject itself may seem insignificant, the scaffolding of ideas that develops around it can, in certain cases, grow exponentially.

During the Spanish Baroque period, royal funerals involved elaborate ceremonies devoted to the care of the deceased’s soul. They were celebrated with great pomp and circumstance, reflecting the theatrum mundi and the symbolic construction of power at the time. At the center of it all stood ephemeral structures adorned with emblems: the catafalque.

The idea of the subject in our present is fundamentally schizophrenic. On the one hand, it champions free will that allows us to take possession of places, things and people... but at the same time, it leaves us unable to move. For if we abandon the vanishing point that allows everything to revolve around us, the world falls apart, becoming unclassifiable and ungovernable.