Cámara de ecos
COAIB
Rafa Forteza
January - March 2026
“A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos.” —Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and SchizophreniaOn the wall of his studio, Rafa Forteza wrote the words Cámara de ecos in charcoal. Perhaps it was a quote, an intuition, a passing thought. Or a resonance that lingered in the space. That echo, which I encountered during a visit, becomes the core of this exhibition.
Deleuze and Guattari understood art, science, and philosophy as disciplines that attempt to bring order to chaos, each in its own way: by generating affects, developing theories, and inventing concepts. But how does one order chaos? This question arises repeatedly whenever I visit Rafa’s studio. Sometimes it is simply a matter of taking hold of an intuition, as if it were a thread between one’s fingers, and following it to see where it leads.
In this case, it has led us to the act of wrapping, the persistence of the circle, and the construction of an architecture that holds memory. The exhibition unfolds as a space of temporal resonance. Spanning thirty years of production, works from different periods address one another, allowing past gestures to trace lines of continuity toward future questions.
Between the mask and the chamber there is a continuity.[1] Not only in the letters that compose their names, but in the gesture of covering, of partially enclosing. Both are articulated around emptiness: that negative space which makes it possible to contain —and also to listen.
Wrapping is an almost magical, alchemical act: embracing materials, bringing together disparate things that should not belong together. In the early 1990s, Rafa was working in a studio in Collioure. The studio tends toward expansion. From the present, I imagine a disordered eruption of materials, trials, errors, and finished works. When the time came to leave that studio behind, he made, in a hurried gesture, the first sculpture based on wrapping: rolls of canvas, painter’s tape, brushes; later blankets, cans, clothes, paint jars, and eventually almost any material at hand. In that gesture, he had found something. He had generated what he would always call a primary space.
He repeated the gesture many more times, surrendering to iteration—what returns differently, in other forms. First in Collioure, then in Dortmund, and eventually back in Mallorca. Along this drift, the sculptures grew feet. During his time in Germany, they began to rest on different kinds of pedestals. This displacement opened so many possibilities that the sculptures began to walk on their own, beyond the artist’s intentions. There was nothing left to do but let them go: not to try to hold onto them, nor to attempt to understand them.
Perhaps one day, understanding will appear as a flash. Until then, all that remains is a way of making that does not obsess over meaning. Meaning, after all, is also produced.
The sculptures, made from the early 1990s to the present, are like suitcases that tell a story of nomadism—not only geographical, but also aesthetic. They are the work of someone who has repeatedly cut his own roots, to prevent certainties from hardening too much, and to allow questions that invite movement to reappear. Most significantly, Rafa has carried them with him from place to place. He did not leave them behind, and this turns them into a wager on the future, and on himself.
The materials that compose them are there, but never fully visible. In a sense, these primary spaces are ways of ordering chaos by generating microcosms. We might read these sculptures as time capsules: rapid, gestural intuitions launched forward. Today, more than thirty years later, their echoes can be heard with the same force as on the first day in the studio.
At the heart of the gallery rises a chamber. It is a contained structure, a minimal refuge where time seems to condense. Inside it, the sculptures are arranged like an archive, placed on shelves or on the very boxes that contain them. Both the wrappings and the boxes share a gesture of protection and partial obscuring.
In fact, wrapping is not about covering; it is about embracing form so that it can appear differently. As if the gesture sought to preserve something of the world before it dissolves or changes too much. To step into this chamber is to approach a murmur. Inside, the sculptures resonate. They emit a vibration that spreads toward the more recent works.
In this way, the exhibition functions as an acoustic chamber of time: past and present works return each other’s voices, repeating, questioning, and transforming one another.
This is an architecture that interrupts the usual path in order to propose another way of inhabiting the space. Building a space is always an attempt to bring order to chaos: to delimit a place where we can pause. But it is also to pose a problem. Every architectural intervention changes the way we move, reorganizes the gaze, and engages the body. Can we allow ourselves to be enveloped by it?
Everything that is wrapped retains a certain emotional temperature.
III. The form (the circle)
The circle paintings, also dating from the early 1990s, enter an intimate dialogue with the primary spaces. The circle is another way of wrapping emptiness. In both cases, matter folds back onto itself, delineates a territory, and sets a rhythm. The circular gesture is a kind of chant that returns to its own point of departure, but never in the same way.
In this sense, circularity becomes the visual motif of the ritornello: a way of returning to the same in order not to get lost. Each rounded stroke, each fold of fabric, each superposition repeats the attempt of that child in the dark—to domesticate chaos through rhythm. In his practice, Rafa does not seek to fix an image, but to sustain movement for as long as possible.
These are paintings in which the rawness of the canvas is respected and, at the same time, built upon in layers. Graphite generates a rhythm: a repetitive gesture that envelops. The circles overlap, moving from ochre to black, passing through red. They are like question marks. Yet they never seek closed answers. What changes when we believe we have them? What is lost when we exhaust the little mystery the world still holds?
These paintings rarely have titles. With one exception: a work the artist dedicated to himself in 1997: vivimos a muerte.[2]
IV. The time (the echo)
Rafa Forteza studied architecture in Barcelona in the 1970s. This fact, together with the context of the College of Architects, invites us to ask what might be architectural in his work. Beyond biographical anecdote, it points to a way of thinking matter: the way he constructs spaces, compacts them, and organizes them, both in his paintings and in his sculptures.
An echo requires space to return, traversing a distance that brings back the same in a different form. It is within this minimal difference—the slight misalignment between a voice and its return—that the ritornello takes place. The sculptures and paintings act as emitters and receivers within this oscillation, so that the earlier works reverberate in the present.
The exhibition thus becomes a structure that accumulates memory: a place where time folds back onto itself and, ultimately, an archive of intuitions.
Once again, Rafa constructs his territory in darkness—not to remain there for long, but to continue creating a point of reference within the noise of the world. This repeated chant seeks, through reverberation, the possibility of beginning again.
And so, on one of the walls, one can read once more, written in charcoal, what had already appeared in the studio: Cámara de ecos.
Architecture is what allows the echo to resonate.
Esmeralda Gómez Galera
Palma, 2026
[1] Translator’s note: in Spanish, máscara (mask) and cámara (chamber) are composed of the same letters, although they do not share the same etymological root. This visual and phonetic proximity reinforces the conceptual link between both terms in the original text.
[2] Translator’s note: Vivimos a muerte is left untranslated. The expression does not have a direct equivalent in English; it conveys an attitude toward life shaped by the awareness of mortality as a horizon of meaning.