In "The perfect crime", Baudrillard affirmed: ... the image can no longer imagine the real, since it is itself real. It can no longer dream it, since it is its virtual reality. It is as if things have swallowed up their mirror and become transparent to themselves, entirely present to themselves, in full light, in real time, in a merciless transcription.

Does an image have mass, does it have size, does it occupy, can it be touched? Pello Irazu, with the sculptures in this exhibition, would seem to answer in the affirmative. His objects dematerialize before the gaze of the attentive viewer to the point of becoming images, and yet, transmuted into mere virtuality, they maintain some of their original characteristics. Perhaps the reason for the existence of these objects is none other than that of having an impact on a contemporary symptom.

Materiality brings us closer to the object. Even from a distance, we are able to perceive its proximity, feel the touch of its surfaces, its temperature, its weight... Matter appeals to the skin and tends to contact, it wants the space to shrink, the distance to shorten. Matter wants to envelop us, with its loving embrace, with delicacy, even if, at times, the gesture becomes violent, and wants to crush us, to displace us, to deny us access to the place it occupies.

There are situations in which matter enters the game of speculations, in the fatality of images. The polished surface, the crystals or the sheets of water, reflect and alert us that the image is an inaccessible state of matter. Narcissus put this incontestable truth to the test, he sought the body of the image, and the liquid matter anguished his breath until it killed him.

On the other hand, the trompe l'oeil-which some of these objects are-alludes to a material reality that disguises itself as another with the complicit help of the image. When, in addition, it is a readymade-a manufactured product that replaces another, a polyurethane beam that imitates an oak beam-it also speaks to us of a social taste for the simulated, the inauthentic, it speaks to us of a preference for the visual over other properties.

When the image completely takes over corporeality, when the objectivity of its physical presence shifts towards a type of presence beyond physicality, we would be, according to Benjamin, in the territory of the auratic; the realm of ambiguous distances or changing results, proximities that are experienced as distances, where the familiar is perceived as strange. A strangeness that manifests itself in the sculptures of this exhibition, as of an alchemy that transforms materials-very material, to the point of coming from the waste itself, from the unmetabolized remains of social consumption, from garbage-into a radiant glow, that warns of the instability, of the helplessness and dissatisfaction of a culture that has renounced its soil to enter the uncertain journey of ungraspable realities, of uncertainty and relativity.