Rafael Fuster

The work of Rafael Fuster (Murcia, 1978) has been characterized from the outset by a reflection on the limits of perception. A Baroque play with the viewer's eye that questions the relationship between what we see and what exists, the tension between what we think things are and the experience of what they really are. Through meticulous sculptural work, his earlier works put this tension into practice. A precise representation of the world managed to confuse the eye and question knowledge through vision. The hardness and solidity of the metal from which the sculpture was made took on the characteristics of the ductility and fragility of paper, the also discarded objects that the sculpture represented. Although illusion and simulacrum were fundamental, this was not a complete deception. Unlike Baroque compositions where, once the deception became evident, the works ceased to make sense, Fuster's sculptures continued to maintain the tension between the imagined world and the real world. When we touched the object—whether by touch or with a haptic glance—and revealed the supposed deception, the illusory property didn't disappear entirely. Somehow, the lightness of the paper, its fragility, remained present, and we couldn't get rid of it. Rather than deceiving the eye, what the artist was doing was projecting qualities onto the materials that remained there forever. These qualities are not only physical, but are ultimately related to a series of ideas about the world—precariousness, abandonment, residuality—that permeate the discourse of the work. The process of "confusion of the gaze" with which Rafael Fuster works takes place through the acute and precise work of mimesis, but also—perhaps even more so—through the object of representation: the residue. As we have written elsewhere, his work can be understood as an "allegory of residuality."