In the Moonshadow of Words by Alexis Yebra

On certain nights, the moon reveals footprints. They are cosmic inscriptions which interrupt the lactescence that the mythical has celebrated, that ancient chants have underscored in its contrast with a darkness encircling the lunar disc. Against such penumbra a rebellion of our satellite has been envisioned, which shines -that much we know- with the incongruity of a light that is not its own.
A primitive imbalance may be assigned to those scars that decompose the homogeneity which the naked eye can recognise as predominantly white. And, of course, whiteness is sometimes besieged by its own phases, stable cycles that disappear it in the dark shroud on which it floats.
The grey accident retrieves in the painting of Alexis Yebra the vestige of already burnt meteors, and becomes texture on which to inscribe gestural remains: it is a writing that seems to deny itself and abandon itself in an instance of vestige. Like the calligraphy of one unfamiliar with the logic of words, these strokes survive like visual poems, around which geometry orbits in circles and lines, forming cellular microcosms or radiances.
A certain violence marks, censoring, the signifier fold of some strokes, and enables at the same time an emphasis on shapes. In the midst of scribbles, textiles reveal themselves as another spelling, in which lace motifs seem to offer greater resistance to the abyss of the meaning with which they are faced. Both registers, however, are penetrated by the crossing-out; the dominant strategy in these paintings, in which the black that stands out by veiling surfaces and fragments might become, at some point, a new surface for inscription: negatives of the white board of the moon, these sombre stripes reveal their willingness to receive their respective collisions: splintered words, from which what barely survives is a choreographic and formal echo; fragments of beautiful motifs; and apparent templates.
And still, in the midst of this obliteration of the sign, and through the smoke that imposes itself on the white, on the grey, something struggles to survive the darkness; something traverses bands of abstract tendencies and is rewritten upon the wound of the shadow as sutures. These patches go back along the dramatised age to which the pictorial gesture seems to point, and delineate the structure of an artificial ruin, now reorganised as the search for a manner of illumination.

Damián Cabrera
Asunción, August 2019