Ángel Mateo Charris (Cartagena, 1962) says that the future cannot be painted, but that we can imagine it no matter how little we stretch the visions of an anxious present full of fears. “The future began to become small in our heads – the incredible shrinking future – as our stupidity as a species took on alarming proportions,” reflects the artist, one of the greats of contemporary figuration, who exposes his casual and colorful premonitions and prophecies in Futurama express, an exhibition in the Parés room that is like the distilled version of the one he presented last October in the Verónicas room in Murcia.
In Charris’s visions there are no flying cars or butler robots, but rather a group of soldiers crossing the snowy mountains carrying Mr. Potato on a field stretcher; the monument to a stray dog, with its ears pricked before an empty landscape; or two women with their pets who advance with determination towards what seems like a tornado… “There are different variations on the future, of course, although fears predominate, which give much more of themselves than good omens. Throughout history it is difficult to find positive prophecies. It is as if fear is more creative.” Charris began to investigate how artists of all time had shaped the future, following a conference she gave at the Prado Museum. Soon, and with the challenge of filling the Verónicas room, an old convent church, he himself decided to join the group of prophet painters.
In addition to the large oil paintings that surround the walls, in the center of Parés, Charris has built a column full of possibilities for the future (wars, desertification…) which, as Mery Cuesta writes – and the artist nods – “are rather doubts of the present (…) hesitations that make us feel in a state of floating.” The future is dark but the painting of it is vital, with touches of pop, full of literary and cinematographic references, comics or advertising, and sometimes hilarious humor. “The theme is tough, but I also wanted to tell the other part, in this world there are also wonders and there is always hope, that’s why I wanted there to be a lot of color and something vibrant. “Take away the topic and end up laughing at my own fears.”
Each of the paintings provides different readings, and together they form a global kaleidoscope in which you can recognize some of the places he has traveled through over the years: Japan, Mali, Burma, Alaska, Canada or the Mar Menor … Sometimes they come together in the same image, as in a kind of parallel universes, like in that painting in which two Malian children walk in front of some shanties behind which rockets from Cape Canaveral appear.
In The Butterfly Effect, a group of Africans carry a melting glacier on their shoulders and a woodcutter with an ax goes to cut down the only tree on an island from which he is separated by an arm of the sea. There are men who jump with blind faith from the roof of their house and apparently calm and cozy houses on whose roof someone has painted a target (Damocles House), tourists who contemplate the effects of climate change as if it were a spectacle and David Bowie’s visionary eyes, which have left the singer’s face, observe the horizon from a snowy mound.
