Multiple eyes are scattered in an agonic world. They remind us some representations of the divine Lamb inside Romanesque churches. Iex Cosmonauta places them under Saint Peter’s dome, and the Vatican has become a shooting range. The Evangelist Matthew has changed his pen for a rifle.
Large-format drawings characterized by a bright line depict post-apocalyptic scenes, introducing us into devastated areas but that seem reluctant disappear. Everything is born again in an eternal cycle, but the clocks have stopped and the geological eras collide into each other. It seems as though the abyssal ocean turn the interstellar space upside down, or Precambrian times would merge with a post-human stage.
So, it is not uncommon to find reptiles and dinosaurs walking among high tech skyscrapers; the Poseidon of Artemision live together with galactic mermaids and African effigies, old idols coexist with new chimeras, the Vulcan salute slips between indecipherable mudras.
Iex plays with multiple archetypes and symbolism (biblical, alchemical, occultist, Buddhist referents…), trying to “break the barrier that separates us from what is beyond that machine of generating concepts that we call brain”.
These are revealing words spoken by the artist can be related to a particular lament by Rilke about perceptual “traps” we impose to ourselves. In the Eighth Elegy, the poet regrets our loss of ability to access “the openness”. Only animals and children keep it. Except for some glimmer of sublimity (when we fall in love or having a mystical experience, for example), we only look back instead of seeing the pure and eternal space without horizon.
It already was said by William Blake: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.
Who formed us thus: that always, despite our aspirations, we wave as though departing? We spend our lives saying goodbye, as eternal spectators of our own disintegration, oblivious to the excessive movement of systole and diastole to which we subject the world.
A series of collages and paintings titled Terra Incognita, Iex was inspired by the Rilkean concept of “openness”, but in fact, we could extend it to his holistic approach to art going through times and spaces, and to his vision of life and death as an “existential continuum”.
Music is his muse, and as Orpheus, he uses it to cross thresholds, to reach the abysses of the underworld and appease dark beasts, but also to disperse himself through the galaxy as star dust.
Anna Adell
Along with his graphic work centered on drawing and collage, Iex Cosmonauta is a co-founder of the Insectotròpics group, which combines audiovisual, music, painting, interactive events and performance.