Maybe in the skin of things, in what still lies between them and us, we may find the senders of our lost letters, the words we couldn’t say. Through a unique narrative that is at once visual, textual, and performative, Carlos Herraiz establishes intimate relationships between anonymous archives recovered from various oblivions. His practice as a walker-gatherer of abject objects leads him on his wanderings to spaces of forgotten memories in the open air, unnoticed storage rooms sprouting on the sidewalks of Barcelona’s industrial periphery, lost-and-found offices found in trash bins, junkyards that no one will ever claim. The artist points to the aura of the remains, stooping before what he perceives not as an excess but as a lack—before what remains of someone else’s memory, who knows if to make it his own, so as not to forget it.

The exploration of these unknown “omissions of memory” takes place in a profound dialogue with his own history of “omissions of language,” marked by the experience of stuttering and unspoken words. This game of hide-and-seek, of pursuing these hidden deployments and intersections throughout the city—disfluent words caught in the throat—proposes an exercise that invites us to move from effect to affect. As we delve into Nomeolvides, we incline more and more toward the memory inscribed in matter. There is a desire for contact, hence the muscular sense of Carlos’s artistic practice, starting from the feet and moving towards the hands, hence the intrinsic process of walking, hence the tactile quality of the materials employed, rising and falling along the body, always handled, always explored.

His body of work, and his work with the body, take on diverse forms in this exhibition that signal the memorable essence of letters, albums, inventories, or rediscovered photographs. These pieces emerge before us, at first glance perhaps indecipherable, superimposed with others, shaken, fragmented... Deliberately, the artist veils and silences them, returning them to us only in the form of unspeakable traces, of what will remain of the objects left to the exposure of amnesia. Nomeolvides thus proposes an alternative to the hegemony of that type of vision detached from the sensible, to precisely provide another space for what was about to be forgotten. And how to see the forgotten. Will we be able to do it?

After years of researching the enigma of human bonds through painting, Carlos Herraiz continues this “thought of painting” in mediation with other practices and materials, now wandering towards the embodiment of memory, also in his own body, in Nomeolvides. It is therefore essential to visit this exhibition by strolling through it, looking at it with hands, not maintaining a prudent distance from the work, “thinning one’s skin” to allow access to the truth.