Scenarios for a journey

In Scenarios for a journey, the artist proposes an initiatory journey through a triad of spaces, objects or scenarios that invite the experience of art as a pilgrimage to reach sacredness, immortality, absolute reality or the search for a center as utopia. Between alchemy and esotericism, Oriol Espinal presents the labyrinth as an imago mundi, and its center as a symbol of the absolute purpose of man or the image of paradise regained. This vision of the labyrinth as a gateway to the dimension of the sacred, coincides with Mircea Eliade in pointing out that the essential mission of the labyrinth is the defense of the center, without forgetting the psychological dimension it acquires in Jung's work. The first scenario of the exhibition, Shelter for walkers, is a sort of cage in whose pavement a labyrinth substitutes the idea of temple or initiatory construction, and at the same time wants to be the reflection of the celestial corpus on earth, symbol of the loss of the creative spirit, the idea of fall defended by Neoplatonism and the consequent need to search for the lost center. In this work all this is represented in a book: Codex Viatoris, which is directly linked to Drache, the exhibition that Oriol Espinal presented in 1993 at Alejandro Sales Gallery. This book is a beautiful object that provides us with the key, the access code to spirituality and the longed-for center; a route manual for the travelers who get involved in this inner journey. The second piece, Tabernacle for a handbook, has the appearance of a tabernacle and inside it is kept the book The Golden Eye, whose content recreates a journey through the idea of sacrifice, the inevitable wound that generates this convulsive initiation process in search of the center. The book, which shifts from red to gold, shows the price of pain and invites us to skin the dragon we all carry inside, to get rid of the useless peripheries and move towards the Selbst. As for the third piece, The chasm of the freedmen, we must say that it is a cylindrical object, a sort of stepped well at the bottom of which rests a mirror. Within the framework of this subterranean we find Night notebook, a little book that gradually reproduces each of the sixteen descending steps of this well that pours texts on its outer surface. To ascend it is necessary to descend; to ascend to the light it is necessary to descend to the shady, or what is the same and as can be read in the same notebook: Monter, c'est descendre à la nuit des sages ; descendre, c'est monter au mensonge des sens. Scenarios for a journey is, then, a triad, a mandala that invites to a cosmic vision of being and to the search for man as center and totality.