{"id":3295,"date":"2025-07-16T15:36:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T15:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/obliquo.art\/?post_type=canela_portfolio&p=3295"},"modified":"2025-09-13T07:04:25","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T07:04:25","slug":"carlosspena","status":"publish","type":"canela_portfolio","link":"https:\/\/obliquo.art\/en\/canela_portfolio\/carlosspena\/","title":{"rendered":"Carlos S. Pe\u00f1a \/ Karlst (13 AGO – 12 SEP 2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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13 AGO – 12 SEP 2025<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The artist Carlos S. Pe\u00f1a<\/strong> \/ Karlst<\/strong> presents a two-channel installation in \u2018Obra muerta\u2019 (Dead Work), a solo exhibition curated by Jose Luis Lozano Jim\u00e9nez<\/a>. It is supported by PROYECTOR.. Supported by PROYECTOR<\/a>.

The Eye and the Surface<\/strong>
\u00abThere is nothing more invisible than the obvious\u00bb<\/em>
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman<\/em>, 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It may be an open window, a camera lens, an eye that watches without being seen\u2026 In Rear Window<\/em>, 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<\/em>, 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\u2014it records, archives, executes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both fictions\u2014one intimate, the other dystopian\u2014reveal 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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work of Carlos S. Pe\u00f1a \/ 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obra Muerta<\/em> is a quiet contemplation of that which floats in plain sight but is not always perceived. In nautical jargon, the \u00abobra muerta\u00bb<\/em> or \u00abdeadwork\u00bb refers to the visible part of a ship\u2019s hull, the portion that emerges and cuts through the landscape, while the \u00abobra viva\u00bb<\/em> or \u00ablivework,\u00bb submerged and functional, sinks into the invisibility of movement and weight. This duality\u2014between what is shown and what is hidden, what remains and what moves\u2014articulates a visual reflection on the bodies that inhabit transit, floating territories, and architectures in motion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Jeffries, the protagonist of Rear Window<\/em>, who turns his window into a device of observation and control, here the artist\u2019s 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\u2019s gaze is expansive, almost archaeological. Rather than recording the subject, it documents the trace\u2014ships, floating structures, mobile fragments that interrupt the everyday landscape and turn it into a non-place. As Marc Aug\u00e9 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<\/em> where the subject dissolves, reduced to a functional gesture: traveling, waiting, consuming. In Obra Muerta<\/em>, Carlos S. Pe\u00f1a \/ 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this silent, almost spectral observation, the installation resonates with works like The Giant<\/em> (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\u2019t 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: \u201cIf 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\u201d<\/em>, writes Marc Aug\u00e9 in Non-Places<\/em> (1992). Obra Muerta<\/em> reframes these non-places as landscapes that do speak to us\u2014if we know how to listen. Floating bodies, mobile structures, fragments of the urban that appear and disappear like signs of a broader narrative\u2014that 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\u2019s work teaches us that to look can also be a way of inhabiting\u2014without possessing, without fixing, without capturing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this passage, the city becomes a dystopian stage, like in Blade Runner<\/em>, where surveillance is not always visible, but always present. The control machine no longer needs cameras\u2014it\u2019s enough to fix one\u2019s attention, to let the frame function as a sensitive algorithm. What is seen is ordered; what floats is codified. And yet, in Obra Muerta<\/em>, there is resistance. The installation deprograms the productive gaze<\/em> and invites us to observe without conquering, to inhabit the surface without needing to penetrate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This work is, in itself, an optical device\u2014but 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\u2014between image and echo\u2014where the political power of looking without capturing<\/em> emerges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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: \u201cSeen 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\u201d<\/em>, writes Byung-Chul Han in In the Swarm<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014that floating obra muerta<\/em>\u2014lives a political power: that of looking without invading, of recording without owning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Faced with the eye that surveils, this work proposes an eye that accompanies on the surface.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jos\u00e9 Luis Lozano Jim\u00e9nez
<\/strong>Associate Professor
Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts
University of Granada

OBLIQUO<\/strong>
Calle Valencia 17, Madrid.
Monday to Sunday from 9am to 10pm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Obra muerta<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

2 channels
5:24 \/ 7.00
2025

In nautical terms, the upper works refers to the surface of a ship’s hull that protrudes above the waterline and is therefore visible from the outside. Similarly, the lower works refers to the surface of the hull that remains submerged, along with all the cargo it contains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This contemplative work is dedicated to understanding the contribution these topsides make to the landscape as they pass through our city, not only through their functionality (underwater hull), but also through the way they blur the immobile architecture of our static spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The focus of this essay is on these \u201cnon-places\u201d and the way they integrate into the spaces they pass through, transforming and revitalising the landscape.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Muestras \/ Shows<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Galer\u00eda Zulo – COEX
CAAM – Espacio CV
Hybrid Art – Margullo Books
Phe Gallery 21<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Carlos S. Pe\u00f1a \/ Karlst<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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After earning a diploma in music production from the Escuela de M\u00fasica Creativa in Madrid (2015), Carlos later developed his interest in visual art as a self-taught artist, ultimately creating a dialogue between the two disciplines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Highlights of his career as an audiovisual artist include COEX, his first solo exhibition at the Zulo Gallery (2021), Obra muerta, exhibited at Espacios CV, Centro Atl\u00e1ntico de Arte Moderno (2020) and at Phe Gallery (2021), as well as Hiperrealidades (2020), his first video art work, which was part of the Canarias en Corto 2021 catalogue. Carlos currently finds alternatives to the perception of our immediate environment in audiovisual language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Visually, he focuses on discovering new ways of seeing through optical tools with which he explores alternative visual fields, such as the use of a telescope in Obra Muerta, a piece he has been developing since 2018. He currently complements his audiovisual technique with the use of digital technology such as photogrammetry and 3D scanning. In terms of sound, he advocates the importance of timbral experimentation and environments with elastic and sustained rhythms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/carlos_karlst<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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