Under Guía (El espíritu del Siglo XX)

Under Guía (El espíritu del Siglo XX), 2015, is composed, in the manner of a tryptic, of three posters reproducing documents from the archive of Pepe Espaliú (Córdoba, Spain, 1955–1993), donated by the artist to the contemporary art centre Arteleku, San Sebastián (currently known as Artxibo Arteleku), before his untimely death. Regarded as a visual library, the work contains letters, notes, quotes, annotations, illustrations and press cuttings allowing us to create multiple readings and stories, and even stories within stories, based on the idea of the fragment and eschewing all linearity. It is accompanied by a publication of the same title held at the MACBA Documentation Centre, containing over a hundred elements from Espaliú’s archive, together with drawings by Gagliano documenting and interpreting them. As explained in the publication’s essay: ‘In the mid-nineties, these documents could still be found within the pages of the books belonging to Espaliú’s personal library, donated to Arteleku by the artist, before he died, and extracted from within those volumes during their rushed conversion from a private entity to public heritage.’