Chema López

Illusion and fear is a publication edited by Museo ABC for the 14th edition of Conexiones, a project in collaboration with Fundación Banco Santander and curated by Óscar Alonso Molina since it began seven years ago. As with the rest of the series, the result is closer to an artist book than to a conventional catalogue. This offers a new view of the exhibition, providing another interpretation to the meaning and perspective of the show.

In this case, starting with the prologue, Óscar Alonso Molina offers a detailed tour of the pieces that make up the display, one after the other as if he were an spectator wandering inside the exhibition room. Images allow readers to imagine themselves walking around Chema López’s work and of course, the guest works from Museo ABC and Colección Banco Santander.

In Illusion and Fear word and image are inseparable. Even the letters in the text have been labeled one by one in each word, phrase and paragraph… and since in the exhibition viewers must find the clues related to thriller movie El Cebo by Ladislao Vadja or E.H. Gombrich’s Art and illusion essay, this book constitutes itself as a movie script, a police record, a witness’s account and the judicial version of the facts, all available to the reader.

An essay signed by Luis Pérez Ochando completes the theoretical part of the book, delving into the referents and meanings of the works that make up Illusion and fear.