—Untitled (Utopia), 1998-2003

Color photographs, various measurements and supports

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This suite of photographs refers to the series of paintings of Hollywood swimming pools that the British pop artist David Hockney painted in the sixties. What in those works was a hedonistic celebration of the male body, of sun-kissed homosexual desire, here becomes a moment of transition, a perpetual autumn in Madrid, where swimming pools await the sign of a new bathing season. The series was produced after a stay in San Francisco, comparing, on the imaginary plane, the reality of California in the nineties, in the post-AIDS era, with the utopian dream of inhabiting a geographic space in which it seemed possible to live sexuality more openly.

Their sense of melancholy reflects the militant texts on AIDS written at that time by Douglas Crimp: a melancholy standing face to face with oblivion, emphasizing a despondency that is not only that of the risk of death, but of the inability to maintain a community of care faced with the symbolic violence of the social coding of the disease. Thus Untitled (Utopia) consists of a set of defensive and militant talismans against the commercialized optimism of the homosexual scene.

Text: Cabello/Carceller and Manuel Segade