In the Parque del Pasatiempo in Betanzos, designed by the Naveira brothers, many historical and cultural forms that define a cosmopolitan imaginary were reproduced. The Park provides a context for the contemplation of multiple sculptures and constructions that can be framed in the idea of the quintessentially European initiatory journey, the Grand Tour, so common between the 17th and 19th centuries. But at the same time the place functions as a mystagogic entrance to an inner journey in which the cultural form acts as a guide to the soul. At the entrance to the Park two lions guard the gate, two lions that the Naveira family copied from the originals in St. Peter's Basilica (Rome), made in Carrara marble by Antonio Canova (1757-1822) for the tomb of Pope Clement XIII (1759-1769). One represents the virtues of faith. The other, eternal life. The lions are the guardians of access to something beyond and prepare the mind for the recognition of the forms to come, in the manner of the Platonic forms. Hic sunt leones, said the Romans, "Here are the lions", the keepers of the secret event. After the Pasatiempo fell into decline in the 1970s, the lions were bought and taken to Asturias, where they now guard the entrance to the sanctuary of Covadonga.
Pablo Barreiro establishes a dialogue with the copy of the lions that travelled from Rome to Betanzos and from Betanzos to Covadonga, seeking an approximation to the Urbild, an archetypal figure that consolidates the idea of a world, the European world. In his work of action and reflection on the copy, making a copy of the copy, he reproduces with visionary intent parts of the lions as signs of a prototype around which the history of art began to gravitate, as Ernst Gombrich points out, defining the canonical sense of beauty. In art schools the reproduction of prototypes was a necessary condition for learning good taste and acquiring mastery of tékhne, technique. Pablo, with deconstructive refinement, reflects on the technical process of reproduction in search of the signature that, like an archaeological trace, remains of that torn, broken, ruinous archetype, of which only the rest, the fragment, the fragment, remains. The connotation of the form does not seek in his work the consolidation of an opus but the representation of the process as the unveiling of the meaning that the aesthetic rule created as an initiatory criterion for the understanding of the world. With the pieces and joint orchestration of this exhibition, the author proposes a counter-initiation, that of the inoperosità (inoperosity) of which the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben speaks in relation to the aesthetic object. Pablo's inoperosity uncovers the consolidated work in order to open it up to new uses that are not only aesthetic but also political, thought-provoking, deactivating canonical cultural action, showing the founding emptiness of the West and regaling us with a Spinozian acquiescentia in se ipso ipso, "a joy that is born from the fact that the human being contemplates himself and his power to act", a contemplative joy that this work in progress presented here presents us with as a possibility of de-inhabiting the Western aesthetic archetype to make it habitable in ways that the history of art has not yet thought of
Roberto Abuín
