The Gaslighter's Nightmare comes from an engraving by A.Tilly that Curro González found in the magazine The Nature published in 1884 that shows a man dreaming as he comes towards the end of his life. His work no longer has any importance to him, & he finds his imagination haunted by images of the figures associated with the invention of electricity. "In a way it reflects," Curro notes, "a state of non-vinculation with the world, of a lack of articulation before it, of not belonging, that makes the engraving attractive, way beyond its nostalgic or conservative condition. The coincidence with my interests is slight but enough for me to be able to make use of the idea of a man who is dreaming & wakes up before images of the world as he knows it, & it is not so much that he does not understand it as that he has no desire to share its new propositions. Resistance to the myth of progress, an attitude so common in the sixties, came wrapped in naivety that, in many instances, led to a search for solutions where there were none, & these frustrations have led us to a situation of lethargy & paralysis, & ultimately to complacency. These works attempt to reflect the feelings we experience before the absence of solutions,before these doubts that take us back to the very moment when the problem ocurs, just prior of finding a solution, but on this occasion convinced that no solution will be found. Nightmare is, perhaps, the state that comes closest to this condition; yet nightmare in the company of it counterpoint - of a semi - consciousness, between sleep & waking, when the continuous flow of thoghts & associations takes us back & forth between darkness & clarity - is itself a metaphor for this situation." Let's coment the major works in the exhibition: The Milk Wood is evidently a hommage to Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. Curro González glosses the work: "the only sensation of relief in all of this comes through approaching the vertigo of words & descriptions, as when the first voice says: " Only you can hear and see behind the eyes of all those who are sleeping, the movements & the countries & mazes & colors & dismays & rainbows & tunes & wishes & flight & fall & dispairs & big seas of their dreams." "Emotion here knows the difference although the mind is defeated in its busy effort to define it. Things are given their precise weight & meanings are enhanced: a familiar landscape in a sidewise light.This is the largest work in the exhibition, 6 x 2 mt. It is a kind of chinese scroll, painted in black almost as if it were a drawing with only a few highlights of colour. In the wood we discern the faces of Curro's own ghosts that for a multiplicity of reasons have mattered to him as moments across his life or as impulses for his work - Brueghel, Williams, Jones, Homer even Marx & Freud. But these faces are partially obscured, partially camuflaged. They are indiscriminately faces and forests, the two are intertwined as if surging throught in sleep as if walking lost in the forest. They appear & slideback, staying there in the edges of the retinas. In a small cameo space, opened up as a kind of clearing in the forest, we see and image of children approaching a spring to play with the water; a dream of lost innocence, a flash of memory, a momentary epiphany.