**Una fascinación.**Solo exhibition by Diego Delas for Galeria Pelaires, curated by Cristina Anglada.

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling. Spell-poems are vehicles of change that take us beyond the border of the rational into a place where the right words can influence the universe.

The Broken Open, So Mayer

If desire is the appetite to see the absent, art looks absent.

The image we are missing, Pascal Quignard

The word fascination comes from the Latin word fascinatio(hallucination, irresistible attraction). Made up of two lexical components: fascinum(enchantment, spell, bewitchment) and the suffix -tion(action and effect) it refers to a set of practices that appeal to a reality of which we know nothing at all, and in which we would like to trascend through prayers, talismans, and charms.

Diego and I happened to meet on Mallorca in September 2023 at the opening of his small-scale exhibition held in the Pelaires Cabinet space. The textile pieces selected for that display referred to Castilian folklore, vernacular architecture, and domestic chores, whilst appealing to memory. It was during those days that we began envisioning what would end up becoming A Fascination, an exhibition spinning around amulets and tarantism materialized, turned physical reality in the space of the gallery.

Tarantismisa set of practices in which the use of music and dance was prescribed to treat psychic disturbances (supposedly caused by the bite of a spider). While researching this concept, Delas engaged with the fascinating figure of Ernesto de Martino, a Neapolitan historian of religion and ethnologist. His work The Land of Remorseanalyses tarantism as a cultural instrument used to confront the crises of presence —an experience where reality collapses, and we collapse with it, and which focuses on the risk of losing the distinction between subject and object, between thought and action, representation and judgment—, which affected the working class in Southern Italy. The historian suggested a kind of reconstruction of the age of magic, leaving aside the negative prejudices that usually come with this way of understanding the world —associated with superstition and irrationality—, and to regard it a key phase in the development of Western civilisation that helped consolidate the presence of human beings in this world, in a period when people did not think their existence on Earth was guaranteed.

We create myths to be able to cope with the terror and vertigo that comes with this fragile, tragic, and fragmented life, to find ways to understand our own human experience in all its complexity. Myth, like art, comes from our imagination, and tries to make its way through that we cannot explain. “Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence.”[[1]](#_ftn1)

Amulets are small objects made from natural materials; sometimes they are so tiny that they even dissolve into words (spells). Fascination is a type of primitive imitative magic, well described by Frazer in The Golden Bough, and by the writer and ethnologist Carmen Baroja in the *1945 Catalogue of Amulets of the Museum of the Spanish People,*which is based on the principle that everything similar attracts the similar. “Perforated stones that cure illnesses, bells that drive away evil spirits, coloured stones that hang from children’s dummies (...); the idea that hardened tips break evil looks as the sun's rays break darkness is widespread all over the world and constitutes a common belief in different civilisations.”[[2]](#_ftn2) .

This exhibition is presented as a narrative created from interlinked objects that interrogate us in some way. The first room features a set of large paintings that outgrow us, contrasting with the powerful simplicity of their motifs and chromatic range, which bring us back to the world of traditional labours and chores. The second room offers a more intimate space, with a series of smaller paintings and textile pieces. Both rooms also feature a selection of sculptures resembling votive offerings.

Resembling the structure of tarot cards, the works gathered here perform somehow like amulets. Their composition outlines a kind of landscape (perhaps a stage) where objects manifest in a particular order awaiting for interpretation, to be deciphered in its cryptic nature*.*

A mountain with downward reflection, clovers, key slots, wheels, spinning wheels, letters, thresholds, hands, snakes, wombs, caves, flowers, birds, towers, sun, stars.... All this combined acts as a map with multiple directions that lead us to dive into the tides of our own depths. Through the game of divination, the paintings are presented as prayers aspiring to connect with that other world that transcends the everyday through the everyday, an increasingly drifting apart world (unlike the rural world of yesteryear). Art seeks something that is not fully there: a blind desire. And the fact is that “painting would somehow be the image of the desire for something absent / A deep desire not to see what is real and which allows us to see the actual image. How does the image look absent inside the image?”[[3]](#_ftn3)

Throughout this search, which starts from his personal experiences, Diego Delas has managed to rescue memories while exploring his own restlessness and curiosity. It is actually in the development of projects such as this one that research, through writing and the crafting of objects and installations that unfold multiple layers, and where knowledge and fiction can lead to brilliant connections.

Diego Delas was born on the 4th March 1983 in Aranda de Duero, Spain. Pisces Sun, Virgo Ascendant and Scorpio Moon. The immensity of the sea and the subterranean waters. He spent his childhood in a small village of less than twenty inhabitants. He later studied Architecture and Fine Arts in Madrid before moving to London, where he obtained a Master’s degree in Painting at the Royal College of Art and a PhD at Ruskin College of Art, Oxford University. He currently lives in Malaga.

Cristina Anglada

[[1]](#_ftnref1)*A Short History of Myth.*Karen Armstrong.

[[2]](#_ftnref2)*1945 Catalogue of Amulets of the Museum of the Spanish People.*Carmen Baroja.

[[3]](#_ftnref3)*The image we are missing.*Pascal Quignard.