"The razor edge "
José Luis Galerro

The modern image of the cosmos dates only from the year 1924, when American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that our galaxy, far from being unique in the universe, was just one of hundreds of thousands of millions. Since then, we have learned exactly where we are located - on the outskirts of nowhere - as well as what the real dimensions of our experience are and the exact meaning of our inner adventure: emptying the ocean with a toy bucket.

Two years after Hubble's discovery, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated his uncertainty principle (the basis of quantum theory), which introduces an unpredictable element in science and confirms randomness as the fundamental property of the universe. Nevertheless, neither Einstein ("God does not play dice") nor his forerunner Newton ("All these regular movements do not have their source in mechanical causes") accepted that we were ruled by fate or, in Breton's words, by a divinity more obscure than any other, but with luminous whims.

In 1924, a year that was no less crucial for the artistic than for the scientific avant-garde, André Breton wrote in his first Manifesto of Surrealism: "Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest freedom of thought. It is not the fear of madness which obliges us to leave the flag of imagination furled. Can't the dream also be used in solving the fundamental problems of life?" And in 1924, in "Self-Defense", he asked himself: "Does not the mediocrity of our universe depend essentially on our power of enunciation?"

During the third decade of the twentieth century, coordinates were adjusted both in the realm of technical knowledge - which could no longer exist free of uncertainty - and in the realm of aesthetic awareness - an awareness that was to find an unlimited field for exploration and experimentation only by questioning its own logic. This decisive confluence of physical discoveries and new poetic principles validated once more the maxim coined by Democritus twenty-five centuries ago: "The human being is the world in miniature."

"God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them... sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered," (Plato, Timaeus, 47 ba).

We should remember that in the Greek language there is an important relationship between the terms "idea" and "vision": idéa ("the image or appearance of an object") derives etymologically from êidon ("I saw"). But, as Nietzsche observed, Democritus had taken care to warn that simultaneously vapors flowed out of our eyes and modified the image. Plato's reconsideration: "And of the organs [the gods] first contrived the eyes to give light... and the pure fire which is within us and related thereto they made to flow through the eyes in a stream... And the whole stream of vision. [produces] that perception we call sight. But when night comes on, the kindred fire departs... and so the eye no longer sees, and we feel disposed to sleep," (Timaeus, 45 bcd).

Breton, in the first Manifesto: "I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality. from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms a particular light has sprung, the light of the image... The mind... goes forward, borne by these images which enrapture it, which scarcely leave it any time to blow upon the fire in its fingers... Surrealism is the invisible ray."

"Use the visible to speculate on the invisible," (Solon). "Invisible harmony is better than visible," (Heraclitus). "Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen," (Anaxagoras). "See with the gaze of intelligence that which escapes the gaze of your eyes," (Hippocrates). "Wherefore, the mother and receptacle of all created and visible. is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible," (Plato, Timaeus, 51 ab).

Reality, that labyrinth with no escape for reason, is a fabric woven of enigmas, specters and mirages that mutually oppose, superimpose and interpose themselves. As we learn to see, we learn to think about what we see. Or the opposite. The identity of the globe is reversible. "Nature moderates this world-kingdom which you see by changing.," (Seneca).

María Zambrano: "Once one's glance poses on life, it is dragged downward toward the inscrutable, toward that which is invisible and unseen but which makes one see. Reality presents itself to humanity in the form of complete concealment, since the first reality hidden from man is man himself. Seeing brings with it the tragedy of the blind man who looks."

"Reality goes by like a galloping horse," (Hindu proverb). Eduardo Scala explains that the horse "symbolizes ambivalence: spirit versus matter, night versus day, life versus death, repose versus action. It links opposites together in a perfect continuum." One knight (horse) was precisely the handicap Marcel Duchamp used to grant John Cage in their games of chess.

José María Parreño: "Chema Madoz looks at things the way the chess knight moves; he focuses his eyes straight ahead and they go two squares forward and one sideways. This equine gaze comes from the reverse, from the other side of logic. He sees a starry cosmos in the dark bottom of a paella pan."

Chema Madoz: "I recall an anecdote from my childhood... I arrived late on the first day of class. All the other children were already seated around a large table in the kitchen and there was no space for me. The teacher said, Don't worry, we'll prepare a place right away, and she opened the door of the oven so that I could use it as a desk. I sat down on my stool with my notebook lying on the open door and looked into the black interior of the oven."

"One has to do something new, in order to find something new," (Lichtenberg). "[Faith is] believing what we have not seen, no! But creating what we do not see," (Unamuno). "They say Faith is believing what we don't see. Poetry is creating what we will never see," (Gerardo Diego).

It only makes sense to photograph the invisible or that which completely escapes our perception, except when the key of the gaze finally opens up an impassable landscape. Disturbingly or humorously and preferably through visual poems rather than ocular effects and by spiritual exercises rather than optical tricks, Madoz is never distracted by confusion but focuses his attention on what is merging, which is often the senses of sight and hearing as in his musical pieces. He is solely devoted to doing something new in order to see something new, to creating in order to believe in what we will never see.

The utopian tension radiated by his compositions - conceived with a soul of fire but, following Miró's precept, executed with clinical coldness - dispels any doubt about the artist's not employing all his forces in each attack. "I have always been interested in the capacity verbal language has to incite visual images... Images that respond to an attempt to create a space where naturally opposing elements coexist easily."

For Chema Madoz, as for José Val del Omar, the extraordinary is found at the heart of everyday life, and the most intimate fibers of the human complex merge with the weave of the universe. An inventor, poet, optician, photographer and filmmaker, Val del Omar declares, "The opposing poles are precisely poles of something - of a magnet, of a globe - and they are therefore inseparable; they are mutually engendering... This dualism of objective aseptic documents ordered by a subjective poetic sensibility, this pulse between the document and the mystery, between information and suggestion, comprises the key to our vision... Today it is necessary to merge, and mergers require close interdependence. A harmonious relationship can prosper in the poetically based audiovisual laboratory and crystallize the spontaneous interdiscipline that enables us to forge ahead without stumbling toward the unity of perception." By interweaving two antithetical levels, this interdiscipline will certainly have the power to carry us farther.

Madoz: "I make the hangman's noose from a pearl necklace to dismantle reality and create an illusive space where the objective and the subjective coexist. This is about making opposites coexist in harmony." Unamuno speaks of the "clash between reason and desire. And from this clash, from this embrace is born that saving incertitude, which is our supreme consolation." Gadamer: "It is not a question of distinguishing but of perceiving the unity of what is different. Blindness consists of not being able to recognize the single unit in what is multiple. The divergence of contrary objects shows the unitary essence of things." Valéry: "Abstract sensations, contradictory but indivisible energies, figures of everything that I love, of change, movement, mixture, flow, transformation, of that stemming from the surprise, the unknown, the impossible."

Fascinated by contrast, Madoz's humor contains an element of metaphysical inspiration and one of poetic descent. His ground is equally fertile for what is alike as for what is unlikely; he searches both for the sanctuary of possibilities and the brothel of chimeras. Or the opposite.

Good sight: see good. The common essence of aesthetics and ethics. Truly see and see the truth. Verbal games, visual games; sudden changes in the direction of understanding. "The transition impossible to foretell goes from seeing to not seeing after having passed from not seeing to seeing. Good-by. A certain way of seeing will soon end. I have worked all my life in this minute," (Valéry).

Paul Reps states that our sight nourishes eighty-five percent of our feelings. "Save my eyes when I have nothing left. Save my gaze. Anything else will hurt me less," (Martí i Pol). "You who approach me carrying your eyes on the tray: Have mercy, Saint Lucy, and preserve our sight and clarity," (Joan Maragall).

The history of the universe began some thirteen thousand million years ago with the start of an expansion that has not stopped accelerating since then. In the year 2004, the galaxy farthest from the Earth was located thirteen thousand million light years from our planet. The drain of the unknown is found in the depth of appearances and the cutting edge of the inconceivable amidst the pages of the known. With your toy bucket you empty the ocean. Spanish version