Ricardo Luevanos

Casa de Arte Limantour, in collaboration with Galería Marchante and SAENGER Galería, present the exhibition Las formas del olvido by artist Ricardo Luevanos.

Over time I discovered that there are multiple shapes of forgetting, though none truly lead us to disappearance, because many of us try to forget by replacing: new bodies, new cities, new routines. Others prefer the archive; they keep photographs, messages, and objects, as if building private museums of what no longer exists.

But the most devastating shapes of forgetting are those in which the person pretends to have abandoned something while continuing to secretly organize their life around that absence. We are talking about people who have spent decades inhabiting the same loss with the monastic discipline of someone tending a flame that cannot be extinguished. It was then that I understood something terrible: forgetting does not mean throwing something outside of oneself. Forgetting is flying inward. Descending into regions where memory becomes an emotional and silent way of inhabiting the world, looking at the sky and being observed from solitude, because there is nothing lonelier than a moon eternally waiting for the return of someone who will never come back. In the end, the shapes of forgetting that Ricardo presents made me understand that no one truly wants to forget. What we seek is something else: to remember, to love, and to preserve, avoiding the devastation of having been transformed by someone. Yet that is impossible. Love leaves residues everywhere, contaminating the world with meaning. And even if memory fails, faces lose their sharpness, and voices distort over the years, something remains intact in memory. Perhaps that is where the most intimate tragedy of human existence lies: we discover too late that we are too fragile to forget.

—Milo Medina