Una Cruzada de Pasiones

"He climbed very high and fell very low." Juan Carlos Garcia and Oscar Monton, 72h, 2005 “[…] and at night, when everything seemed asleep, a legendary noise broke the night, the party must continue.” Roses Club, Keep the Party Going, 1992 When you want something very, very badly, so much so that you are willing to do whatever it takes to get it, the wish becomes reality inside your head. It has never been more attainable than in that moment, when it seems to stand before you. But, just as your fingertips are about to touch it, it vanishes without a trace. And there you are, still, with the face of an idiot, thinking about what could have been and was not. Although, thinking about it, what difference does it make? A crusade of passions emerges as an invitation to rethink those events that took place around the city of Valencia —in that convulsive time that goes from the mid-eighties to the beginning of the nineties— and that have been recorded in the collective unconscious of several generations. A moment that crystallized, in an effervescent and magical way, the union between artistic disciplines and musical genres and, like everything that accompanies magic, a moment condemned to disappear without revealing the trick. The city showed magnificent potential to position itself outside the mainstream circuit: the yearning for freedom, the desire to be part of what was being created, the appetite to be avant-garde. A crusade to experiment, innovate, express yourself and, again, for freedom, whatever its meaning. The proposal begins at the House of Chappaz Showcase with the pieces by Niño de Elche (Tecnocaucho, 2021) and Guillem Sarrià (Auge, 2021), both produced expressly for this exhibition. They introduce that moment of effervescence into the room, a panorama of musical, aesthetic, industrial and political explosion. Two pieces that review the past through its archive of imaginaries. The exhibition continues at House of Chappaz Flat, where Ángeles Marco (Camouflage, 1989) stands out as one of the voices that immersed herself in the artistic conceptualization generated in that period to renew it through sculpture. Pepa Salazar (Untitled Piece, 2021, in collaboration with Mario Montesinos), Ovidi Benet (Destroy 2021, 2021) and Guillem Sarriá (Caída, 2021, second chapter of the piece presented at House of Chappaz Showcase) materialize the explosion and, finally, the subsequent decline. That movement set a pattern that left its mark on those who lived through it and on the following generations. Each one remembers it in his own way, and it is very different for those who have lived it through testimonies or stories. A crusade of passions materializes that mixture of fascination for living "something that is generated" and that could not be produced, that latent sensation that is part of history. Because Valencia was the place. Text by Julia Castelló and Ali A. Maderuelo, curators