The Wounded Star

 

 

I meet Chema Alvargonzalez in 2022 through his cultural legacy in Berlin, through the GlogauAIR. In the trendy Kreuzberg neighborhood, in an imposing historicist building designed by the German architect Ludwig Hoffmann in 1896, located next to the canal, is more than just its founder's project; it embodies the almost physical, and often abstract, intensity of Alvargonzalez's feelings about everything around him.

 

Chema Alvargonzalez is considered one of the most representative artists of the first generation of cultural technological globalization. He belongs to the group of artists who began their professional careers in the late 1980s and developed an artistic narrative of research in the circles of photography and multimedia art in the 1990s.

 

When he was still a young student in the late 1980s, after attending the Massana School in Barcelona and feeling drawn to the Berlin art scene, he moved to complete his studies in Fine Arts and Multimedia at the Hochschule Der Künste, where he became a disciple of Rebecca Horn and later a friend. Under Horn's influence, his interest started to develop and he began his experimentation with his first light and word installations, as well as with themes of absence, loneliness and isolation.

 

Travel was always a constant in his life. During his childhood, for professional reasons related to his family and later driven by his curious personality and restless nature, he became a cosmopolitan nomad. In addition to immersing himself intensely in the daytime and night-time experiences of cities through photography, he obsessively recorded moments, scenes and circumstances of shadows, lights, commercial signs and reflections that would later

Travelling objects are also a constant feature of his language and media—suitcases, maps, compasses—but not only these; the window through which he observed urban impulses during his travels also became the frame of memory about emptiness.

 

The emptiness is marked by the historic moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). The artist experienced the immense agitation of the city's reconstruction and becomes a chronist of the empty and contradictory spaces of the German capital. In the works of this period, we find the observation of the city's evanescence, searching for signs left by absence but preserved in memory.

 

Alvargonzalez develops a formal and hybrid artistic language that harmonises light and words in interpersonal relationships within an urban context. Light is essential in his work, but not as a technological or digital instrument, rather as a free instrument, without restrictions on intensity, direction or form. The source of energy, whether natural or electrical, solar or celestial, LED or neon, is the origin of knowledge and the sign of the times. Taking advantage of its strength and contrast, he uses it as a social and political tool for alertness, contemplation, and reflection. But it is in the poetic word that he finds the monument to memory and elevates it to space as a physical and inspiring presence.

 

The materialities in his artistic production are almost obsessive, but without ever repeating or exaggerating the reflection of the feeling they convey.

 

In this very first retrospective exhibition of the artist's work in Portugal, we awaken from the darkness of today's society, in a literal and poetic sense, but also towards the meaning of words. Whatever the language could be, the light blinds us and inevitably leads us to focus on the feeling, an apparent simplicity that materialises in just one or two words.

 

As befits Alvargonzalez's work, the exhibition begins from the outside, with the observation. But little by little, we are transported on an inner journey, his own?! Or perhaps at the present moment, when we are inevitably compelled to explore the archives of our memory in a solitary, intimate and extraordinarily personal way.

 

We enter into the building hosting the exhibition, trying to understand the meaning of MEHR LICHT, its purpose and perhaps even its scope The images overlap like layers and we return to our memories: some of them glittering, others not that much. Objects that encourage us to move —perhaps by force, depending on the context— but above all, it reminds us that everything in the time we travel through our human evolution is in transformation. The journey between the visible and the invisible that shapes life.

 

By observing each of the works on display, we travel along with Alvargonzalez.

 

In his absence, we find out about the theme and the imprint of his artistic work, the melancholy of the open space he leaves behind. Perhaps only the coincidence of poetic perception warns us about luck.

 

Is it abandonment, the forgetting of feelings, or simply a wounded star?

 

 

Mercedes Cerón, october 2025

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