13 MAY – 09 JUN 2026

OBLIQUO presents Reverie (2023), a solo exhibition by Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero. The exhibition, curated by Mario Gutiérrez Cru, is presented with the support of PROYECTOR.

“There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Walter Benjamin’s well-known statement resonates quietly within Reverie, a work that, through the apparent lightness of its form, places at its center one of the most persistent material conditions of our time: plastic as waste.

At first glance, the piece unfolds through a minimal gesture: a sheet of plastic caught in the wind, continuously shifting across the landscape. Yet within this insistence lies a fundamental paradox: what appears ephemeral is, in fact, deeply enduring. Plastic—residual product of an accelerated logic of consumption—reveals itself here as one of the most stable, and problematic, elements of our environment.

In this sense, Reverie situates itself within a broader artistic tradition that has taken waste as a field of inquiry. Not as mere material reuse, but as a critical engagement with what society discards. The residue ceases to be invisible and becomes image, presence, symptom. What is expelled returns.

The work operates through a restrained, almost minimalist aesthetic, in which the movement of the plastic acquires an ambiguous quality, somewhere between the choreographic and the accidental. This unexpected beauty does not negate its condition as waste; rather, it intensifies it. What drifts, what seduces, is also what persists.

Presented in the storefront of OBLIQUO, within the specific context of the Lavapiés neighborhood, the work establishes a direct relationship with the street. The exhibition device opens onto everyday circulation, blurring the boundary between inside and outside, between the artistic image and the urban environment. In this sense, Reverie is not only displayed; it is inserted into a real landscape where plastic—as waste—is part of daily experience.

The piece does not need to underline its ecological dimension or articulate an explicit discourse. Its strength lies in suspension: in that extended time in which the viewer is confronted with an image oscillating between fascination and discomfort. There is no resolution, only a question that persists.

In that persistence, Reverie activates a reflection on our relationship with the remnants we produce and on the capacity of art to appropriate them—not to redeem them, but to return them to the field of visibility. Because perhaps, as the image itself suggests, what truly defines our landscape is not what we build, but what we leave behind.

OBLIQUO
Calle Valencia 17, Madrid.
Monday to Sunday from 9am to 9pm.