Closer Than They Appear: "Una rosa en la oscuridad" by Pilar Córdoba Longar at CROMA

David Bowie's "Deranged" plays as you enter the small exhibition room at CROMA, where Pilar Córdoba Longar’s five-piece collection, Una rosa en la oscuridad [A Rose in the Dark], is on display. Her recent work features elements alluding to automotive and highway themes, presented in cross-stitch embroidery, gridded fabrics, chrome license plate frames, black bases, and bright green lines. As I continue to gaze at the black fabric of the embroideries in Una rosa en la oscuridad, No paramos de matarnos and Alejas [A Rose in the Dark, We Never Stop Killing Ourselves, and You Drift Away], I am engulfed by a cyclical sense of confusion, memory, and phantom-like imagery, reminiscent of the greasy hands on a yellow silk dress from Lost Highway (Lynch, D. 1997). I feel the presence of the highway, as in the film’s opening and closing sequences, where night merges sky and asphalt. Yet there is also softness—the tension of fabric against the sharp chrome frame—recalling childhood memories of sitting in the foam-filled, fabric-upholstered backseat of a family car. There’s something here beyond the toxic masculinity of a Lynchian leather interior. The piece El lugar en mi mente que todavía no es memoria [The Place in My Mind That Hasn’t Yet Become Memory] condenses this feeling in its title: the liminal space between ‘now’ and ‘what was,’* the tension in which we exist.

On the right, as a passenger, I don’t know if I’m pressing the invisible brake or accelerator beneath the glove compartment—destruction or salvation, adrenaline or contemplation. In Claudette Walls Manilo’s accompanying text, I sense the same apprehension and impulse. Before our safety lies the desire to question the critical limit of a body made of both flesh and machine. This desire was also noted by Octavio Gómez Rivero in his curatorial work Pies de Plomo [Lead Feet] (2024) at Relaciones Públicas gallery, where Córdoba Longar’s work was recently shown.

I want to add memory to desire—this sounds like drunk driving. A nostalgia that keeps me awake unfolds in this exhibition, amidst the works, the brief words exchanged with the artist at the opening, the exhibition text, and the images evoking road trips…

From the backseat, we no longer see the eyes of those upfront, only by some miracle do we catch the exact angle in the rearview mirror. Here, everything is an image, and it passes quickly, while the one holding the wheel stiffens their back and tightens their shoulders, like the steering column connecting their hands to the tires.

To my right, I’m blinded by the chrome on the hubcaps of the truck speeding beside us. The artist’s Rosas Rojas [Red Roses] awaken a radiant terror: tire lacerations, side-panel damage, retinal strain.

The radio display reads "alejas" [drifts away]; you watch your father’s arms—those we once thought invincible—tremble and burn, his eyes drying out as he fights sleep to stay focused. For years now, he’s known he needs glasses, but he ignores it.

Green in its many shades and shines: traffic lights, signs, vests, the price of gas, diesel, grass, and trees. We leave the city, and someone in the car remarks, “I can’t believe this much green is so close to all that concrete.” But there’s also light in the darkness, a signal, green meaning "go," the green line on black fabric, a rose, the thorns, an old tattoo—maybe the first, now faded with time.

We drift away with every promise to return after crossing imaginary lines.

The smell of earth and cows, smoke and sweat, skin and plastic under the sun. As the line of cars waits to cross, the air becomes stifling.

The insistence of these images, these memories, with eyes wide open. All those who spent their childhood on the road, through long hours of silence in the instability of changing landscapes, know a peace that’s hard to find today.

It’s impossible to return to the places we never wanted to go, where we were taken; impossible to return to those same places without being taken again.

–Don’t look at the rearview mirror.

The image of that horizon we break through remains latent, while someone floors the accelerator.

Recently, I had to explain why migration, travel, moments of waiting, uncertainty, and movement are not "limbo, where nothing happens," why they’re not just machines and time. There is life, and we live it. It’s that simple. It’s an assembly, a gearbox searching for transmission ratios between the gears that make us up, with no axles to limit us. More speed or more traction? It depends on the terrain, the route, the distance, the time.

–Are we there yet?

We see a rose in the dark. From this window, we know the hermetic silence and ominous shadow of the headlights coming our way at night.

On the unlit highway, we find a rest stop, a diner, a gas station, a bar, a café, a refuge to stop by.

“The more people, the better. Truck drivers know where the good, cheap food is,” someone says from the front seat.

Among thorns and dim light, we feel the stale air with a strange calm.

Decay, flowers suffering from smoke and dust, our tired bodies, sleep, the cars consumed by the underbrush when they won’t start again.

–It’ll be quick, leave the engine running.

In the distance, we see the lights of others moving through the night like us.

A Rose in the Dark is a small but powerful exhibition. Here, memories linger, refusing to let us rest—the ultimate proof of life lived. The contrast between embroidery and chrome metal, softness and sharpness glinting in the darkness, is not a contradiction, dichotomy, ambivalence, paradox, or aporia; it’s the memory of all those who don’t know how to return.

— Guillermo Boehler

Translated to English by Luis Sokol

* Benjamin, W. (2002). The Arcade Project. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 462.