We contain many roads: some roundtrips that at times we travel until we split into two, others one-way that forbid us from looking back and many others on which we cannot recognise any direction at all. Life sculpts us slowly, silently; it cuts grooves into our skins and our souls. And as time goes by we fill with roads and we become more and more like stones; we discover that the stones also have a soul and skin and roads.

It is very easy to get lost and find oneself along the roads that Ángela Galindo offers us in her pieces, because she is time and the canvases are the skin, soul and stone that surrender in her hands, that let themselves be turned into the mirror of all that we dare to look at head on.

Metaphors of being acts as a type of sweeping map intending to show us a territory that all of us either inhabit or have been in at some point. As a suggested starting point, we enter a first central, nuclear, enigmatic space, inhabited by silence and by some creatures observing us, firmly clinging to their frames. Some of these creatures are like weft and others like stones. They only appear to be still, since they are really vibrating, each fabric according to a different frequency. This is why the silence is also only an appearance.

The weft hide as well as reveal. Under their complicated open skin, other, deeper skins beat. We can make out other colours and textures that we cannot see and that are breathing, cloaked and safe. We can feel how structures emerge that at first sight are not there but that substantially modify our perception of what forms the exterior surface. Some of the weaves are softer, younger, still showing remnants of sweet smoothness. Others are very old, so much that it would take us an entire lifetime to get to know them profoundly. We cannot pass by any of them quickly or we would lose the valuable opportunity to enjoy a curious metamorphosis: that which our own skin experiences when we stop to contemplate them. The way of osmosis, the vibration of each weave activates colours that inhabit the deepest layers of our being and we are tinged with the subtlest transparencies. To see this you only have to look into yourself.

For their part, the stones are almost impossible stones that hold complex balances. They are stones submitted to the gravitational force of to be and being -wishing- in the cosmos; stones with soul, skin and roads. Some born from simple lines and others from forms full of porous material, they establish a succession of choreographic movements. Then it is our turn to stop and dance like the stones. The challenge lies in dancing while apparently still, to the sound of the frequency to which each fabric is vibrating. Achieving this is something like discovering that we are more and more like the stones, to the extent that time fills us with roads. But there is something that unexpectedly interrupts our intimate dance: a frequency that is inaudible, but that we know is especially deep, calls us and we cannot resist; we are forced to change spaces.

We cross the threshold of a new room which, although it appears very different, we can identify as another planet from the same vibratory galaxy, as part of the same map in which we are submerged. There, on a corner, we discover the source of the irresistible song of the sirens which have drawn us from the other room. This is a dark stone, vertical and horizontal at the same time. A stone only apparently separated from the other stones. In fact, this stone is going to help us understand that we are really following the same road that we began dancing on.

That stone, resounding and visceral, surprises us by changing frequency as we near it. Its powerful call becomes sweet and hypnotic, preparing us for a type of trance. Our moorings loosen as do those of the dream skin, which we discover floating to our left, loosened from its original frames and multiplied in the space under complementary forms and colours. Along with a white matrix-skin, we find another skin studded with black islands that seems to sleep and to drag us to the unknown of the night; these forms emit an undulating and subtle song, dense enveloping melodic lines that in turn wrap around diminutive vibrating fireflies. What in one fabric appears as forms of light, white skin-matrix, appears in another as figures made of darkness, black and white skin. The second fabric is, in turn, the result of two almost identical fabrics that are superimposed, thus giving us the experience of being caressed by halos of shadow. The white skins, positive and negative figures of the same formal scheme, maintain, however, a certain distance between them, thus letting us inhabit the diaphanous space that they delimit with their attributes of pigmented light and texture. This dream skin, apparently divided into four, truly holds silence: it tries not to wake us.

But that is not possible. Much more powerful than silence is the sound of absence. It seems to sound like silence, but if we use our ears to listen well, we realize that a terrible difference exists: silence lets us hear that we are alive, that we have a heartbeat and breath, that we vibrate; on the other hand the sound of absence is the bittersweet voice of death, the absolute absence of vibration. With this dry voice we become conscious again. We look again to our left, in an involuntary attempt to find the sound of our heart that is masked by the overwhelming interference of the panel of absence. Two tense surfaces, corseted on frames like a grille, nude and asymmetrical, again black and white, to which red has been added as a naked counterpoint. Each framed in its own weave, two windows with crossed cords imprison, apparently, the vacuum.

And at this point we assume that in this vibratory galaxy almost nothing is what it seems. In reality, the two cord windows do not have the depth to allow us escape from the voice of death, rising flight in red, diagonal falling in black. Enraptured, we bounce on the floor without understanding very well what has happened and it is as if we have arrived at the other end of the room, again next to the black stone that has not ceased to emit its impossible call. But this time, the rock is on our left and with its vibration, our heartbeats – which we thought extinguished forever- return.
Before us, like an invitation, arises an imposing ancestral creature. It is a female creature. Kissing the night, kissing the night, besando a la noche… Headphones facilitate our immersion, presenting us with a poem as a text sound. Kissing the night, kissing the night, kissing the night. The night-creature looks at us through and from all her eyes and two breast-mountains bathe us in the honey of the moon and feed us inside so that we can attract the whale. We must be very prepared to receive the whale appropriately. We never know when it may arrive, and as much as we want to see it and try to predict its movements, it always appears by surprise.

We are expectant, looking in all the corners of the room, behind the pieces of fabric, in the gaps in the floor...where will the whale come from? When we finally give in and take refuge again in the kisses of the night, we begin to note a very intense heat right in the centre of our chests. We know then that we are going to close our eyes, very softly sing a lullaby that has never been sung before and rock gently from side to side without making a sound. The heat in our chest turns the blue of the sea and in this way we wake the whale little by little.

And we understand that the whale has been travelling inside us from the beginning, that it shares our blood and our heartbeats and that it has come to carry us on its back as far as we will allow. And we laugh and we climb up its skin, deeply affected, bewildered by such joy. The eye of the whale has seen us and this is all that we needed – now we understand that- to travel towards the unknown.

Flying through the air we cross oceans of night, of dreams, of absences, of weft and stone and we cross the threshold of the sacred temple of the whale. These are textured grounds with the echoes of the sea as its warp. Echoes that sound and echoes of colour that we remember having sensed beating under the weft. Echoes that we see because they make sound and echoes that we hear because the colours vibrate, each according to different frequencies. Echoes only apparently distant, since we know the sea where they were born right in the centre of our chest, just where the whale was born for us.

The eye of the whale looks at us again and the room is flooded with salty water that tastes of iodine and different kinds of algae. Like a miracle, we breathe under the water with the brachia of painted fabric. The miniscule crystals of salt that surround us act like very strong magnifying glasses and thanks to them we discern that each fabric is worked by infinite grooves, like our skin, like the skin of the stones. And that the unity of each colour that at first we thought we could see in each fabric is only apparent, since several strata hide underneath, each one at a different frequency. In fact, each fabric sounds like a chord of multiple frequencies that together compose a strange harmony.

Ten harmonies of colour, one voice speaking and singing from the belly of a cave and the laugh of the whale swimming happily alongside us. Drunk with this music we open and close our new brachia to its rhythm without realising that we are getting closer and closer to the exit, to the end of an experience after which we cannot return to the world as we were before we lived it.
The water level is going down, our brachia are reabsorbed, leaving a strange sensation of emptiness and the whale that came out of our chest is submerged in one of the painted fabrics that surround us and disappears. But we have learned how to bring her to life again and this certainty, very deep, saves us the sadness of a good-bye.

To go back to the everyday.
To return.
We leave, we breathe air,
our feet support the weight of our body.
In the apparent calm
different questions rise up and envelop us:
was everything we lived real? was the road travelled
inside
or outside?
The whale, echoes of the sea, dancing stones,
the eyes of the night…, could they,
possibly,
be the beating of
our own
heart?