The Strange Order of Things arises from the meeting of seven artists from different backgrounds, experiences, and practices. Rather than building the exhibition around a shared theme, the project begins with the possibility of juxtaposing languages that are not necessarily linked, allowing the works themselves to generate connections, correspondences, and unexpected affinities.
The title suggests a condition in which order does not necessarily coincide with a leitmotif, a rule, or, more generally, a principle of systematicity. Rather, it can take a more unstable and unpredictable form: a temporary configuration that emerges from the proximity between diverse elements, styles, and stories, from an unexpected convergence, or even from simple coincidence. What appears inhomogeneous can thus reveal a structure, while what seems distant can generate unexpected forms of commonality.
The works of Adam Bilardi, Johannes Bosisio, Henri Haake, Emma Stern, Théo Viardin, Jaime Urdiales, and Shoshana Walfish enter into a dialogue that is not established a priori. Each practice retains its autonomy and language, while the exhibition context allows each work to be observed also through the connections it establishes with everything around it.
From this perspective, the idea of relation can also be understood through a conception of the body and matter close to Gilles Deleuze's thought: not closed entities defined once and for all, but multiplicities traversed by intensities, capable of modifying themselves through encounters and of composing or decomposing in the continuous becoming of experience. A body, much like an image or a work of art, is not defined solely by what it is, but also by what it can do, by what can traverse it, and by the relationships it is capable of establishing.
In this sense, the works do not present themselves as isolated presences, but as elements capable of mutually altering the perceptive field in which they are placed. Their juxtaposition does not determine a synthesis, nor does it imply an attempt to construct a common identity; rather, it produces a multiplicity of relationships through which each element can acquire new interpretations. The order evoked by the title is therefore not a prescribed structure, but something that manifests itself at the very moment the works are juxtaposed and left to interact. It is an order that does not precede the experience of the exhibition, but can emerge only through it.
This dynamic manifests in different forms within the heterogeneous practices of the seven artists. In Adam Bilardi's painting, seemingly irreconcilable polarities, men and dogs, tenderness and violence, attachment and loss, coexist on the same surface, transforming contact into a space of tension and relationship; Johannes Bosisio instead inscribes transformation directly into the material, altering smooth and reflective surfaces through scratches and incisions that challenge the boundary between the natural and the artificial; in Henri Haake's paintings and drawings, composition goes hand in hand with dissolution: layers of the image overlap, rewrite, and cancel each other out, giving rise to a reality suspended between recognizability and unreadability; in Emma Stern, the question of identity confronts the virtual dimension: female avatars constructed through 3D modeling and translated into painting create a tension between empowerment and objectification, reality and simulation; Théo Viardin's painting pushes this openness beyond the human boundary, giving shape to hybrid creatures and enigmatic figures in which human, animal, and matter seem to participate in the same process of transformation; in Jaime Urdiales, the relationship is built between experience and imagination: motels, deserted streets, and urban landscapes become suspended scenarios where memory, desire, and visual culture overlap, transforming the everyday into something familiar and at the same time alienating; finally, in Shoshana Walfish's painting, the body itself becomes a surface of intensity and transformation: figure and background, interior and exterior, real and surreal interpenetrate, dissolving the idea of a stable identity in favor of matter open to encounter and becoming.
For some of the artists involved, this encounter also develops through the experience of a residency in Gistel, Belgium. Moving away from their usual context and facing a new, intimate location distant from the pace and demands of daily life fosters a condition of greater concentration and listening. An almost meditative experience, in which the absence of noise and embellishment opens a further space for observation and reflection on both one's practice and one's Weltanschauung.
The works developed during this residency thus enter into relationship with all the other works created in studios or at other times and contexts, bringing different experiences, places, and temporalities into dialogue. The residency is not merely a moment of production, but becomes part of a broader process of displacement: physical and geographical, but also perceptual and creative.
It is precisely this spatio-temporal crossing that contributes to the unique configuration of the exhibition. Madrid thus becomes the meeting point where different trajectories temporarily converge. From here, the works are therefore not brought back to a common narrative, but left free to generate new interpretations, both individual and collective.
The Strange Order of Things thus observes what happens when different elements are placed in the same context. An order can emerge without having been designed; a relationship can appear where it was not foreseen; a distance can transform into an unexpected form of proximity. The exhibition builds itself within this unstable space, where the works retain their autonomy while simultaneously contributing, through their juxtaposition, to the formation of a momentary and surprisingly fluid configuration.
The result is an unusual order, not because it lacks coherence, but because its logic is not immediately recognizable: it must be traced, intuited, sometimes even projected. It is an order that belongs to things only at the moment they come into contact; a liminal, at times pareidolic state, in which what already exists can take on a different meaning simply through proximity to something else. Probably because it is precisely there, where ideas become interchangeable, that the élan vital continues to stir.
