Tania Fer

The immediacy of the photograph in Rafael Andreu's series Fluid Memory (2019-2024) dissipates when he sets them aside, for years at a time, before excavating them and encountering a new form in their surface. It becomes a long process boasting the memory of a concrete action captured in a photo, then partly hidden by the large shade that covers them all. The stain of paint guides the sensuality into an abstract and uncontrollable imagination, into a state of swirling endlessness. These paint-stained photographs challenge the viewer by covering specific areas, which, even being covered by the chance of the paint, are also controlled when deciding where the paint should begin to flow. Andreu's artistic style always floats into frontiers, in this case, between photography and painting, between the concrete and the abstract, and between memory and oblivion. Never before published, Fluid Memory was kept exclusively as an archive of beauty, seeping into its present form to find unhurried extrapolations of precise moments from five years ago, now remembered anew and with more anonymity than before because of its newfound abstraction.