13 AGO – 12 SEP 2025

The artist Carlos S. Peña / Karlst presents a two-channel installation in ‘Obra muerta’ (Dead Work), a solo exhibition curated by Jose Luis Lozano Jiménez. It is supported by PROYECTOR.. Supported by PROYECTOR.

The Eye and the Surface
«There is nothing more invisible than the obvious»
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, 2008.

It may be an open window, a camera lens, an eye that watches without being seen… In Rear Window, Hitchcock invites us to inhabit the desire to look from the apparent innocence of the home, where leisure becomes surveillance and the other becomes an object of suspicion. Distance does not protect; on the contrary, it exposes us to the ethical fragility of seeing too much.
Decades later, in the film Blade Runner, that gaze becomes institutionalized. Control is no longer an individual impulse but an opaque, technological, and ruthless system. Bodies are catalogued, pursued, removed. The artificial is not threatening because it is different, but because it demands to be seen as human. Here, surveillance does not hide—it records, archives, executes.

Both fictions—one intimate, the other dystopian—reveal that to observe is also to dominate, that every gaze carries a form of violence, subtle or brutal. Between half-drawn curtains and screens that record everything, a pressing question takes shape: who has the right to look, and at what cost?

The work of Carlos S. Peña / Karlst is situated in this unsettling threshold, where looking is already intervening, and where the image is not neutral, but rather weapon, mirror, and trap. Faced with the watchful eye, art becomes a counter-gaze.

Obra Muerta is a quiet contemplation of that which floats in plain sight but is not always perceived. In nautical jargon, the «obra muerta» or «deadwork» refers to the visible part of a ship’s hull, the portion that emerges and cuts through the landscape, while the «obra viva» or «livework,» submerged and functional, sinks into the invisibility of movement and weight. This duality—between what is shown and what is hidden, what remains and what moves—articulates a visual reflection on the bodies that inhabit transit, floating territories, and architectures in motion.

Like Jeffries, the protagonist of Rear Window, who turns his window into a device of observation and control, here the artist’s gaze is activated from his window, from stillness he traces the vibration of the ephemeral. But unlike the immobile voyeur who reduces the other to suspicion or narrative, the artist’s gaze is expansive, almost archaeological. Rather than recording the subject, it documents the trace—ships, floating structures, mobile fragments that interrupt the everyday landscape and turn it into a non-place. As Marc Augé notes, non-places are spaces of transit without anchorage, defined by the fleeting nature of their relationships and the neutrality of their architecture. They are made to pass through, not to dwell in. They are the stages of supermodernity where the subject dissolves, reduced to a functional gesture: traveling, waiting, consuming. In Obra Muerta, Carlos S. Peña / Karlst focuses precisely on these suspended, floating spaces that traverse the sea without belonging to it, transforming the landscape without settling in it. His gaze does not seek to fix a meaning but to register that transitory condition as a form of writing upon the environment.

In this silent, almost spectral observation, the installation resonates with works like The Giant (1983) by Michael Klier, where the world is revealed solely through images captured by surveillance cameras. In both cases, the landscape becomes an observed, fragmented, impersonal body, recorded by an optic that doesn’t touch but captures everything. The gaze is not human, but no less intimate for that. In its distance, there is a new kind of sensitivity, a poetics of control: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place”, writes Marc Augé in Non-Places (1992). Obra Muerta reframes these non-places as landscapes that do speak to us—if we know how to listen. Floating bodies, mobile structures, fragments of the urban that appear and disappear like signs of a broader narrative—that of a living city, surveilled, but also full of interstices for contemplation. On the edge between the visible and the ignored, between what moves and what watches, Carlos’s work teaches us that to look can also be a way of inhabiting—without possessing, without fixing, without capturing.

In this passage, the city becomes a dystopian stage, like in Blade Runner, where surveillance is not always visible, but always present. The control machine no longer needs cameras—it’s enough to fix one’s attention, to let the frame function as a sensitive algorithm. What is seen is ordered; what floats is codified. And yet, in Obra Muerta, there is resistance. The installation deprograms the productive gaze and invites us to observe without conquering, to inhabit the surface without needing to penetrate it.

This work is, in itself, an optical device—but also a drift, a meditation on what moves, what dwells between waters, what appears and vanishes. Faced with the act of surveillance, it proposes a pause; faced with the impulse to control, it suggests drifting. It is in that interval—between image and echo—where the political power of looking without capturing emerges.

In a time saturated with images, where everything seems visible but nothing is truly seen, his work brings us back to a gaze without rush, without objective, without capture: “Seen this way, we should say we have no private sphere today, for there is no sphere where I am not an image, where there is no camera”, writes Byung-Chul Han in In the Swarm, 2024. It invites us to contemplate not to control, but to coexist with what cannot be pinned down. Like those hulls that graze the water’s surface and drift away without a trace, the work opens a fissure in the architecture of the static, revealing that even the most solid is transient.

To observe, in this case, is to recognize the fragility of outlines and the temporality of landscapes we believe to be permanent. On the surface of the visible—that floating obra muerta—lives a political power: that of looking without invading, of recording without owning.

Faced with the eye that surveils, this work proposes an eye that accompanies on the surface.

José Luis Lozano Jiménez
Associate Professor
Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts
University of Granada

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