Hugo López Ayuso

The work proposes a dramatic setting, structured by a non-hierarchical scenic inter-dependence, brought together figuratively by a common architectural relation, generating a space that looks like a theatre stage. The general tone of the work moves between a sense of the grotesque and the fantastic. We can find elements of physical comedy and characteristics of the romantic comic-sublime. The mixture of a historical referentialism set within the history of painting and the formal stylistics of cartoon articulates a tension between a lofty and a laughable tone and grounds the dialogue between the use of motifs of the familiar and a figuration of the unreal, establishing a friction between visual registers of the uncanny and the marvellous. We can also notice elements that belong to the realm of meta-fiction, such as the use of trompe-l'oeil or the baroque trope of the image within the image, and the use of a fictional author, almost in the mode of a 'dramatised narrator', which is present in the titles. 

The content of the images seems to be addressing, in an allegorising way, different extreme ethic scenarios, such as the advent of the catastrophe (left panel), the coming of Christ (center panel) or existential ecstasy (right panel). Nonetheless, the use of humour strategies in the images does not seem to be presenting the content in a type of self-parodic operation but rather, the irony seems to be aiming at our own existential circumstances and contradictions.