Fernando Carabajal

Unión presents the book presentation and guided tour of the individual exhibition Elefante en la habitación in company of the artist Fernando Carabajal and the curator Vlad Kromenko.

According to Fernando Carabajal, the elephant symbolizes the link between writing and the visual in his work. It is something that cannot be expressed or materialized in any other way. The elephant is an epiphany that defines the indefinable, that names the unnameable. It is a form that contains an entire universe. Black metal music, in contrast, means the loud and blasphemous. For the artist, these two dimensions exist in correlation and balance within his creative space. The image of the elephant allows Carabajal to establish a transition between the concrete and the abstract, between words and non-verbal sensations. As the artist-author points out: "the zebra from the stripes, the giraffe from the spots and the elephant from memory." Thus, the elephant personifies the deep memory that encapsulates visual archetypes, guiding Carabajal's drawings to the realm of the ineffable. Dissonant music provides a dimensional surface and counterpoint, where contrasting energies meet and interact. This nexus of elephants and black metal represents the singular space and time that the artist inhabits, containing the full spectrum of his vision. When Carabajal draws, he invokes this elephant guide to awaken intuitive meaning, as he channels the cacophony of metal into discursive structures. The two flow in symbiosis, connecting the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious. For Carabajal, the dialogue between elephants and music unlocks his creative power to manifest images between worlds, giving shape to cosmic truths.

— Vlad Kromenko